Friday, February 06, 2015

Ram v. OneWest Bank (Cal. Ct. App. - Feb. 6, 2015)

Here's yet another "wrongful foreclosure" case.  Like so many, many others filed in the wake of the Great Recession.

Its fate is the same as nearly all of them.  Dismissed by the trial court.  Affirmed by the Court of Appeal.

The only wrinkle in this one is that the panel disagrees on precisely why plaintiffs lose.  But everyone agrees they do, indeed, lose.

I'm not exactly sure who's prosecuting these appeals, or the underlying business model, when (as here) the plaintiffs are represented by counsel.  Sure, you can get money from the plaintiffs themselves, but presumably not a lot, since they're people who can't even pay their mortgages.  Of course you can alternatively take a piece of the pie, but as I said, there's pretty much never -- never ever -- any actual pie, so I'm not sure how that works as well.

Maybe you're just a true believer.  Surely there are indeed things about the whole "robosigning" process, and other unique aspects of the whole MERS arrangement, that might make you perceive that things are sleazy and hence that you might potentially prevail at trial.

But I think the judicial attitude in pretty much every single one of these cases (including this one) is basically "Hey, you didn't pay your mortgage, and you lost your home.  That's the way things things work.  You can't file a lawsuit based on 'ticky-tack' violations if you didn't actually pay."

Whether they say so or not.