Nick Timiraos has a great piece in the WSJ about the state of play on foreclosure defense litigation. It quotes Larry Platt, a bank-industry lawyer at K&L Gates (which lost Ibanez). It’s worth pausing for a second to consider what Platt said.  Although Platt

concedes that banks may have been sloppy… [he claims that]… “the real assault on the legal system” are efforts by judges and local officials to strip lenders of their rightful ownership and make foreclosures impossible.

Platt’s view, it seems, is that everyone understood the mortgage deal and that the paperwork doesn’t really matter. That’s a very problematic view for any attorney to take, much less one with a background in real estate, secured lending, and securitization. (A less charitable interpretation of Platt’s comments is that the proper outcomes has nothing to do with law.  Instead, it’s paperwork and intent be damned, we’re the banks so we should win by right.)