Susan Murphy has been litigating against banks and servicers since 2011 and she created Advocate Legal as a resource for homeowners to avoid the tricks and traps that banks use to foreclose.
Advocate Legal is a trusted source for all the information you need if you are facing foreclosure of your mortgage for any reason or in any dispute over title to your property. A practicing attorney for 25 years, Advocate Legal founder Susan Murphy is a seasoned litigator for quiet title, partition, or wrongful foreclosure that is also dedicated to keeping you out of foreclosure to begin with.
The mission of Advocate Legal, founder Susan Murphy, has always been to educate homeowners about foreclosure through free consultations and informational videos. As a trial attorney, Susan specializes in multiple types of litigation related to mortgage lending, property title, and possession and she is experienced in dealing with all kinds of fraud against homeowners and their property. She will use that experience to fight for you if you become a client.
Securitization allowed Wall Street Firms to originate your mortgage by selling stock to investors. Since the Wall Street model of “originate and sell” did not include servicing your mortgage, the business of mortgage servicers was born and banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America became servicers. To take more power for themselves, these servicers created a shell company named MERS and a new kind of mortgage– the MERS mortgage - that named the shell company MERS as a beneficiary.
Securitization was the cause of the financial collapse of 2008 and the MERS mortgage is the cause of the ongoing war between borrowers and servicers. Because the MERS mortgage names MERS as a fake beneficiary, it splits risk and reward. The investor, your actual beneficiary, gets no reward from foreclosure, only the risk. The mortgage servicer, represented by MERS the fake beneficiary, has no risk by foreclosure but only reward. This is why it feels like your servicer wants you to fail; because they do.
A lawless battleground was created when the mortgage servicing business sprang up to service mortgage debt on behalf of real estate investment trusts. These servicing companies promote the fiction that you are their client, that they want to help you avoid foreclosure, but the opposite is true. You are an obstacle between them and their foreclosure fees. You are not their client.
Once your mortgage servicer pushes you into foreclosure, there’s a gauntlet of other bad guys eager to profit from your distress. Clients have come to Advocate Legal after spending thousands of dollars on attorneys and paralegals with only a horror story to show for it. Sometimes a weak complaint was filed to “scare the bank” with no plan to follow through. Sometimes no complaint was filed at all. Many times our clients have complained they weren’t sure if their attorney was working for them or the bank.
No good foreclosure attorney will advise you to stop paying the bank and start paying them, but this is also a story we constantly hear. Neither will a good foreclosure attorney take a case “on contingency” since foreclosure rarely results in large financial payoffs that the attorney can take a piece of. In the best case, a foreclosure attorney that takes a case on contingency is naïve or new. They may also plan to do very little work. In the worst case, they may plan to profit from your foreclosure.
Advocate Legal Litigation Support is proud to serve clients throughout the state of California with expert legal counsel in Wrongful Foreclosure, Quiet Title, and retrieving Surplus Funds after foreclosure as well as retaining possession and avoiding Eviction after Foreclosure. If your foreclosure issues involve probate or bankruptcy or you need the best appellate attorneys, we can also refer you to experts in these areas. If you are facing foreclosure in another state, we can explain the law in those states and find you a local attorney to help you as well. Contact us now and get a consultation with Susan.
During the foreclosure crisis of 2008, mortgage servicers used every kind of trick to avoid giving borrowers a modification. Faxes and applications would be lost, “packets” would have to be redone and resubmitted and promises were never put in writing. After enough delays, or failed modifications and resubmissions, a borrowers’ default would become so great that no mortgage assistance would apply.
As stated in Part I, if you have stopped paying your mortgage during the pandemic you will fall into one of two categories. The first group of you, which will be an extremely small group, will have received a written forbearance agreement from your mortgage servicer which will allow you to miss six months to a year of payments and have them tacked onto the end of your mortgage.
