Article Courtesy of The Palm Beach Post

By Kimberly Miller

Published April 2, 2012

The so-called foreclosure king of Florida knew his reign was over four months before his law firm's doors would officially shutter.

"There's nothing left for you here. There's nothing left for me here. We're done. And that's the end of the story," one of David J. Stern's chief employees remembers him telling her in November 2010, according to her deposition.

• Despite 377 complaints to the Florida Bar related to foreclosure fraud, not a single attorney has been sanctioned. Stern remains a member in good standing.

• The attorney general's investigation into foreclosure mills withered this year when the state's power to subpoena them was quashed.
• A required mediation program ordered by the Florida Supreme Court for lenders and homeowners died in December after a lack of participation and cooperation rendered negotiations impotent.

And the 368,000-case backlog in the state's foreclosure courts has grown as the Stern firm's wayward files added to the logjam, some attorneys said.

"Let's face it : Florida was struggling with foreclosures in the first place," said Sylvia Ayalon, a former analyst at the Consumer Mortgage Audit Center in Fort Lauderdale, who now works for Fembi Mortgage in Miami. "That combined with a defective process, the large footprint of the Stern firm, and the backlog just continues to grow."

Still, there has been some progress in the foreclosure courts since the unprecedented rise and fall of The Law Offices of David J. Stern.

Repairs to the Stern files, where necessary, leave stronger legal claims that could protect future home buyers from having to defend title to their home, said foreclosure defense attorney Frank Albear of LaBovick Law Group in Palm Beach Gardens.

Also, Florida's courts have started paying more attention to allegations of fraud and the defenses of homeowners, said Roy Oppenheim of Oppenheim Law in Weston.

"The entire chapter before the collapse was one of the darkest hours in the history of the Florida Bar and jurisprudence," Oppenheim said. "But now, arguments we've been making are resonating, we're getting cases dismissed, and judges are no longer taking at face value everything the banks say."

Stern's company, founded in 1994, grew to one of the largest firms in Florida by 2009, handling tens of thousands of foreclosures for federal mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and netting an annual revenue of $260 million, according to a January lawsuit filed by a company that bought Stern's back room business in early 2010.

But by fall of that year, allegations surfaced nationwide about illegal shortcuts banks took to speed the foreclosure process, including robo-signing - a term used to describe several practices including forgery, notary fraud and swearing to the veracity of documents despite not having read them.

Some law firms, including Stern's, were accused of similar practices.

After then-Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum announced in August 2010 that he was investigating a few so-called "foreclosure mills," and depositions were released of former Stern employees, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fired Stern's firm. The company slashed 70 percent of its workforce.

"Within two weeks, everything was pretty much gone," Stern said in an April deposition taken as part of a lawsuit filed by former employees who accused the company of violating 

Because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac took their files from Stern's office, his attorney, Jeff Tew, has argued the company could do little to help with an orderly transfer to new lawyers.

A letter sent to Florida's chief judges in March 2011 from Stern said he was closing his offices at the end of that month, leaving the 100,000 cases statewide dangling.