Elizabeth

“Is it this big white house on the corner? Huh. Not what I was expecting.” Doug and I pulled up alongside the curb and I turned off the car. We were meeting a potential new client today. She didn’t have her own means of transportation to come to our office for her free initial consultation. Although she would have – she offered to take a bus, two trains and a cab to get to our office. Not that we were so far away from each other. Our office was only about 15 miles from her home, but there was no direct route. It seemed silly to make a 60-something year old woman go through that much trouble for a consultation. Plus, we needed the work, so we didn’t mind making the trip.

It was overkill to have Doug and I both there for the consultation. This wasn’t the type of case that would need to be staffed by two attorneys. Foreclosure defense is mostly hand-holding and making sure that the bank isn’t abusing the process (and the homeowner’s rights) along the way. But as a matter of safety, we always went together when we were making house calls to potential clients. We never know what we're going to walk into.

We walked up to the front door of the expansive white house. The enclosed front porch wrapped around the entire front of the house and was lined with curtained windows. The home was big enough to be a two-family…perhaps it was. The property was very well-kept for a house that was facing foreclosure, owned by a single older woman. I rang the bell and waited, unsure of what to expect.

“You must be Loretta and Doug. Welcome to my home.” Elizabeth greeted with a broad smile. She was donning a navy blue pants suit and heels. Some clients feel compelled to dress up for meeting with their attorney. It’s completely unnecessary, but I appreciate the clients that treat their problems like those problems matter to them. Some clients show up late to their appointments, avoid paying for my time, and interrupt my advice to answer their cell phones for social calls. It’s hard to get those clients to take my advice, which sometimes makes me second-guess why I bother to give it at all.

The inside of Elizabeth’s home was immaculate, albeit a bit dated. The dark wood paneling and pea green carpeting told the story of a house that had not been redecorated since the 1970s. To the left was a wooden staircase that led upstairs, to what was described as an “apartment,” although there did not appear to be a separate entrance. To our right, a living room furnished with a love seat and dark wood coffee table, and an end table with a pair of rosary beads on it. Elizabeth led us down the long hallway toward the small, white kitchen. The cabinets were painted white particle board, nothing fancy. In the middle of the kitchen was a small table. There was a white lacy tablecloth on it. Atop that was a serving bowl filled with fruit salad, along with a platter that held some celery and Ritz crackers.

“Would either of you like something to drink? I don’t drink alcohol, but I do have water and soda.” It was 11:00 in the morning, so the offer for a stiff drink seemed out of place, but she was being polite and generous. I could see that she put some effort in to preparing for this meeting, almost like she was hosting us, so I accepted the offer for a glass of water.

“Please, help yourselves,” she offered, politely inviting us to sit for our meeting as she placed small plates in front of each of us. She had retrieved them from inside her oven. Apparently she used that for storage, rather than cooking. I wondered what was in the cabinets.

Elizabeth wanted to meet with us to see if we could provide a legal defense to a foreclosure action that had been recently filed with the court. During the housing boom pre-2008, potential buyers were approved for home loans without regard to their ability to repay them. They didn’t know that, of course. Buyers still had to apply for a mortgage in the traditional sense. But the underwriting of those loans was a farce – one only need apply and the loan would be issued. Unfortunately, most buyers relied upon the banks to tell them what they could afford, so if they were approved, they assumed it was because underwriters determined they could make the payments. Once the housing bubble burst, homeowners who had never before faced or had reason to think they would face financial distress suddenly found themselves unable to make their mortgage payments. This resulted in a flood of foreclosures. Our law firm had not done much foreclosure defense work at that point, but that was the work that was starting to pour in as the foreclosure crisis mounted. Elizabeth was one such victimized homeowner. She had modified her mortgage to take equity out of her home so that she could pay for her mother’s medical expenses, and the loan she was given was completely unsuitable based upon her income.

Doug and I started by explaining to Elizabeth our relative experience, the cost of our services, a general explanation of how a judicial foreclosure works. We explained to Elizabeth that while we could defend the foreclosure for a time, unless she could come up with the money to bring the loan current or prove an income that would make her eligible to modify or refinance, what we were really doing was just buying her time until she could make other living arrangements. That’s just how it worked. The foreclosure crisis brought with such an influx of cases that the courts became largely desensitized to the individual circumstances that that make each homeowners situation dire. The fact is, if a homeowner was behind on their mortgage, the bank could foreclose, period. The reason “why” was largely irrelevant.

That is a terrible conversation to have with someone, to tell them that they are going to lose their home. The reality of having nowhere to go, the looming threat of forcible eviction by the sheriff, the shame of the neighbors seeing the bank employees driving by to check-up on the condition of its "collateral" - it devastates people. The fear and the stress of it breeds desperation, and with that, desperate demands, so it’s important to keep the client expectations realistic. But my god, when the clients are sitting across from you, crying, asking if their kids will have to change schools, telling you that they can’t sleep because they are afraid the sheriff is going to yank them out of their bed, you want so badly to tell them none of that will happen. But that would be lying to them. So we have to break their hearts instead.

Elizabeth did not cry, or reveal any signs of her hidden distress, when we gave her our evaluation. She took it all in with almost clinical composure. And then said she’d like to tell us a little bit about herself. But what Elizabeth shared with us was more than just the story of how she couldn’t pay her mortgage. It was her life story, really. She shared with us that she grew up in the house that we were sitting in right now. That for a short time, when she was young, she did some modeling. That explained the youthful portrait photographs of herself that adorned the hallway we had walked through. That she lived in this house with her mother until her mother passed away in the bedroom upstairs, Elizabeth acting as her caretaker and nurse in her mother’s final years. That she was a deeply devout Christian woman. That she had never married because her uncle had molested her as a child, causing her to chose never to have an intimate relationship with a man. That she did like to put a bowl of water and if she could, a little bit of food, outside the backdoor to could feed the cats. That she had been going door to door offering to clean the homes of her neighbors for cash, so that she could collect enough money for mortgage payments. That she had taken a job as a delivery driver of medical supplies, working overnight and sleeping and eating in her truck, driving hundreds of miles in the span of a day, so that she could collect enough money for mortgage payments. That she had tried to rent out the upstairs bedroom to strangers, despite her previous trauma, to collect enough money for mortgage payments. She deeply loved this house. She had never lived anywhere else. Elizabeth’s story was heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time. She was not bitter or angry or bragging or sad when she told it. She was just introducing to us who she was, same as we had to her.

When she had finished, Elizabeth excused herself from the table and went into what I guessed was a bedroom, behind a closed door off the kitchen. When she returned, she handed me a pile of cash. I don’t know why I was surprised, often times people in financial distress deal in cash only. It was our retainer fee, and then some. She had done that intentionally. She wanted to make it clear to us that we would be paid for our work, no matter what, despite her own financial difficulties. It was important to her that we knew that.

Elizabeth’s lawsuit lasted approximately 2 years. It was hard-fought, which caught the bank by surprise. Because most borrowers simply cannot recover once they have fallen behind, a foreclosure lawsuit is almost a guaranteed win for the bank and oftentimes they treat it that way. Fortunately for us, the bank staffed the case with a young attorney who was not particularly skilled. In Elizabeth’s case, there were irregularities with the loan documents, signatures that did not appear to be hers, and problems identifying the holder of the loan. The inexperience of the bank’s attorney provided a real opportunity for me to exploit each of those irregularities, buying her more time. But as we got deeper into the case, that time started to turn into a glimmer of hope. We were succeeding. Normally, these cases do not get to a point where anyone is sitting for a deposition, but the bank wanted deposition testimony from Elizabeth. I sat through that deposition barely breathing, my stomach in knots, just hoping that the defense attorney would not upset her, that she would not make a mistake. She, on the other hand, was focused, collected, and calm. A rock star. She caught every mistake the defense attorney made, and answered every question perfectly. She rattled him, not the other way around.

We got all the way to the point where we were talking about a trial in Elizabeth’s lawsuit. Back then, that rarely happened in a foreclosure suit. As we prepared, it was dawning on Elizabeth, on me, and most certainly on the bank, that there was a chance the bank could actually lose this trial. That Elizabeth could win and keep her house. That risk was enough to bring the bank to the table. They agreed to modify her loan without proof of income, forgave what was in arrears, and dismissed the lawsuit.

Elizabeth would get to stay in the home that she had lived in for her entire life. And I did that for her.

It’s now been almost 8 years since her lawsuit ended. She is in her 70s now. She still lives in that home, grinding out odd jobs here and there to make enough money to get by. The attorney for the bank stopped practicing law shortly after her lawsuit. Last I heard he was working as a realtor.

Every year since her lawsuit ended, Elizabeth takes the little money she has and buys me a birthday card, walks to the post office, and mails it to me along with a $10 gift card to Dunkin Donuts. And on every Easter, she sends me a card with a note letting me know that she thanks God every day for bringing us together, because I am the reason that she has her home.

So every year now, I am reminded that I love my job because it matters to the Elizabeths out there.