Action Date: August 26, 2010
Location: Fort Lauderdale, FL
On August 11, 2010, the Florida foreclosure mill law firm of Shapiro & Fishman (S&F) filed a “corrective” mortgage assignment (copy available in the “Pleadings” section herein). According to S & F, this “corrective” assignment was necessary because previous assignments filed by S & F were signed by Linda Green “who at that time did not have signing authority on behalf of MERS.” The day before, on August 10, 2010, the Florida Attorney General’s office issued a press release identifying S & F as one of the Florida law firms under investigation for unfair & deceptive trade practices involving improper documentation used to speed foreclosure proceedings. When Linda Green signed the prior assignments as a MERS officer, she was actually employed by Lender Processing Services in its Alpharetta, Georgia offices. Lender Processing Services decides which law firms get assigned foreclosure cases by the banks in hundreds of thousands of cases. Lender Processing Services hires the law firms and provides these firms with the documents they might need – using its own employees to sign the documents – without authority from MERS. The “corrective” assignment was signed by Kathy Smith and Joseph Kaminski who were identified as Assistant Secretaries of MERS, as nominee for American Brokers Conduit ( a company in bankruptcy since 2007). Smith & Kaminski are not actually employed by MERS or by American Brokers Conduit – so S&H may need another “corrective assignment.” The original assignment was dated October 17, 2008 – over two weeks AFTER the Lis Pendens was filed, but the “corrective” assignment attempts to solve the obvious lack of standing by a provision that states that the actual delivery of the documents took place on an unspecified date “and that such delivery of documents had occurred before default and before the filing to the lis pendens…” Courts and homeowners can expect a few more corrections from Shapiro & Fishman.
