Source - Fire Dog Lake

By: Cynthia Kouril Wednesday January 4, 2012 7:22 am

In 2010, the Law Offices of David J. Stern spun off the robo signing document mill part of his business into a separate, publicly traded company.

Stern pocketed some $60 million from that deal. The investors got the company and all its documents, internal procedures and everything you would need in order to find out what really happened within the Stern document mill.

A little after 8 AM EST today, a filing went up on the SEC’s Edgar database. It’s a Complaint in lawsuit, dated yesterday.

The lawsuit is by the investors suing Stern for lying to them about the activities of the document mill and misleading them into believing they were buying a legitimate business instead of a criminal enterprise. Unlike a regular plaintiff or an Attorney General who is dependent on obtaining documents and information FROM the target of their ire via discovery of subpoena or search warrant, these plaintiffs apparently have all the info they need already in hand, because they bought the company.

Let me give a quote or two from the Complaint to show what they found in the books and records of the Stern foreclosure mill.

32. The Seller Defendants’ fraudulent and illegal foreclosure practices prior to the Transaction, and the subsequent demise of the Seller Defendants’ law practice, have now been well documented and reported upon in the local and national media.

33. Prior to the Transaction, the Seller Defendants were at all times well aware that DS Law and the Target Business were intentionally perpetuating a fraud on the courts by, inter alia, systematically filing forged documents, forging signatures on such documents, fraudulently backdating documents, improperly notarizing and witnessing documents, fabricating documents, signing affidavits without reviewing or verifying the information contained therein, prosecuting foreclosure cases without obtaining proper service of process, and filing foreclosures with inaccurate and/or incomplete documents.

34. Indeed, the Seller Defendants directed employees of DS Law and the Target Business to purposefully overlook glaring inaccuracies in foreclosure pleadings and to essentially rubber stamp computer generated documents without reviewing or verifying the accuracy of the documents. New attorneys at DS Law were not only encouraged, but were even ordered to sign legal filings and pleadings without reading them. As a result, false and inaccurate documents were routinely executed and filed with the courts in an effort to hasten foreclosure proceedings and illegally obtain final judgments of foreclosure for the Seller Defendants’ clients.

This is an explosive document, because the plaintiffs here are like insider whistleblowers; they know what’s in the files, because they have the files. This is a godsend for homeowners who have been victims of foreclosure fraud.  It should dramatically increase the pressure for criminal prosecution. More to the point, judges with robo signed documents in front of them will be even more concerned about granting foreclosure judgments; at least they will be when the news about this gets widely reported. Huge hat tip to Florida foreclosure defense guru Lynn Szymoniak who emailed me the Edgar link early this morning while the electrons where still warm.