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» VISIT US ONLINE @ DSNEWS.COM JUDICIAL REVIEW JUDICIAL REVIEW BEST PRACTICES Unfortunately, it's all too real. For some, raw, even. "Just the facts of this story will scare the hell out of you," is how the incident is described by an executive with first-hand knowledge of the case who spoke with DS News on condition of anonymity. Also very real is the profound, almost defiant difference of opinion the circumstances have stirred. In one corner, you have those who are convinced Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto—motivated, perhaps, at least partially, by political ambitions—went outlandishly overboard in the November 2011 trial of two mid-level staffers at Lender Processing Services, Inc. (LPS), title officers Gary Trafford and Gerri Sheppard, and that members of Masto's staff overstepped their bounds in the investigation leading up to the trial, causing a key witness and LPS notary to take her own life. Trafford and Sheppard were indicted on 606 counts of felony and gross misdemeanor charges for allegedly directing "the fraudulent notarization and filing of documents which were used to initiate foreclosure" on thousands of Clark County homeowners in violation of state law, according to the Nevada attorney general's office. As described by the Huffington Post, Masto's was the first criminal indictment to come out of the nationwide robo-signing scandal uncovered in late 2010 in which mortgage servicing companies and banks processed foreclosures "en masse at lightning speed by signing documents they neglected to review and falsifying information." "It wasn't the right way to do it, but it certainly wasn't illegal," the source who asked not to be named said of the procedural errors in question, which were discovered to be widespread across the industry. The source added that the two title officers were in no way attempting to defraud the system or homeowners, nor were their actions meant for personal gain, and when the issue was brought to the attention of LPS' upper management, they ordered the practice stopped immediately and controls instituted to prevent its recurrence. "We wouldn't have thought [Sheppard and Trafford] would have been prosecuted for a criminal offense," nor were they members of senior management who, based on the fundamental chain of command, would have characteristically been held accountable, according to the source. "We couldn't figure out why [the state] was going after these lower-level people. They weren't senior POINT— COUNTERPOINT S uicide. Accusations of prosecutorial overkill fanned by political aspirations. Scores of homeowners perhaps unfairly evicted. All elements, surely, of a nightmarish made-for-TV movie, right? INDUSTRY INSIGHT Did officials in Nevada bend the rules to make robo-signing a criminal offense, or is it a case where the end justifies the means? executives. These were low-level people that were being criminally prosecuted," and their bail was higher than Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky's, the source said in quantifying the extreme nature in which some believe the case was handled. In the other corner of this contentious storyline are those who insist the government hasn't gone nearly far enough in cases like LPS'. One such individual who doesn't find Trafford and Sheppard's situation at all perplexing is longtime consumer advocate Ira Rheingold. He undoubtedly parrots the view of many, citing the thousands of families and individuals who, perhaps unnecessarily—or, at the very least, prematurely—lost their homes as a result of what he describes as overzealous mortgagers, champing at the bit to foreclose on properties and rake in profits. "What seems to get forgotten is that we're talking about people's homes. We're talking about families' homes, and I think the notion that we need to speed up everything, that we need to maximize every dollar that we can wring out of the poor homeowner who's struggling is wrong," said Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates. "The systems that LPS devised were about making collections fast and easy and when something wound up in default, move people out of their homes as quickly as possible." In the overall scheme of things, which side has 55

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