ONE: Stumbled Upon ...

Sometimes, you're just in the right place at the right time.

I got a message from my secretary mid-morning on an early November day last year, 2010.  I was heading to meet a client about a serious custody case, but I saw that an old client had called, so I called him on the way.

It was a beautiful, clear-skyed Friday.  The leaves were turning, maybe a little later than they had when I was a kid, and I was driving the curvy roads down to southern Stone County, enjoying the drive and the late-fall colors that draped the hillsides.

After a couple of cell-phone missed connections, I got a hold of my guy.  He told me that his dad's property, long the source of contention, was to be sold on the courthouse steps in about 45 minutes.  Was there any way I could be there to help them buy a little time as they tried frantically to get the money together?

Normally, a lawyer can't do anything in 45 minutes except ask three questions or blow his nose.  I have stopped foreclosures in the past in a very short time, but generally a very short time meant a couple of days, at the least.  But I like to try to be creative, so I thought of what I could do.

I told him that I couldn't, that I was more than 45 minutes away. But I had an idea.  I called my assistant Stevie, and asked him if he could make the ten-minute drive to the courthouse.

Stevie is a world-class guitar player and an ascerbic wit.  If you gave him a birthday cake, he would still look like he was about to hit you.  He conquered the guitar years ago, and now it speaks for him like his own language, one you've heard before. If there is a musical playground in heaven and I get to pick a band, my snobby musical self would pick Stevie as my guitar player over Richard Thompson or Tom Verlaine or Don Rich or Eddie Van Halen or Jeff Beck, guitarists whom I love dearly.  He plays fast and smart and on the edge, and I'm pretty sure he could kick any of the other guitarists' asses as well.  He's my Man Friday, and he's good at handling bad situations.

We probably generated ten phone calls between the three of us, and Stevie made it in time. When he got down there, just as I was to go into my meeting, he called me with a really strange piece of information.

"There's only one person here."

That one person was a representative for Unnamed (we'll get to that later), a big-city law firm who handle probably a quarter of the foreclosures in the state of Missouri.  We had met before on a number of occasions, and I was neither a Facebook friend, nor on their Christmas card list.  I believed, and still believe, that they have a huge conflict of interest in all of the cases they do, but I had never really seen it as any more than that.

Unnamed was the attorney for the banks, but would also have themselves appointed as the trustee in the foreclosure.  Then, they would push to foreclose as quickly as possible.  To me, this was a BIG problem, because the trustee, under tons of Missouri law, was supposed to have duties to both the borrower AND the lender.  How can you do your duty to the borrower when you're acting like the US Army trying to hunt down Saddam Hussein?

We had told them this, over and over, starting way back in 2005.  This is a conflict, dear boys.  This is a conflict. Dude.  Seriously.  You've got a conflict.

We had told it to them in at least three prior cases.  We had written it.  We had said it to them in person.  Sky writing.  Smoke signals.  Semaphore.  But it was no use.  They still called the banks "our client."  No, hoss, you've got TWO clients here.  Mine's just the one without the money and with the home that you're trying to steal.

Each time, we had been successful at stopping the foreclosure.

I talked to the woman.  She was not a lawyer. She would wait ten minutes, maybe fifteen.  That was all she could do.  After that, she would have to call the sale.  That was not unreasonable, I thought.  She had other people's houses to take and miles to go before she slept.

Where was the representative for the bank, I asked.

I couldn't believe what I heard in response.

She was the representative for the bank.  She would be bidding in the property.

WHAT?  I nearly fell over.

I couldn't believe it.  It might be one thing to refer to one party as your client and still do a good job at your job, but now I was hearing that they weren't even requiring the bank to be there at the sale!  Did they have a range of authority?  If someone else bid would they come back with another?

How can you have duties to both sides, come to a sale, and then act at the bidder and the seller and leave the other party, literally, out in the cold?

I talked to Stevie again.  GET THIS ON TAPE!  Thank God for video-equipped cell phones.  He taped the whole sale, which was like a scene out of Becket, with a woman essentially talking to herself, bidder and trustee and seller.

Now it all made sense.  This wasn't an omission on Unnamed's part.  This was proof that they not neutral, they were partisan.

Now I had something to work with.