After learning that employees were signing documents without reading them and without a notary present, some of the country's largest financial institutions put foreclosures on hold. In courts around the state, lenders filed paperwork halting foreclosures because they were now questioning the validity of some of their evidence. Stephen Bucha III oversees foreclosures as chief magistrate of Cuyahoga County's Common Pleas Court. He says easily thousands of cases in the county system are now in this judicial limbo. In a court issued memorandum last week, Bucha says the courts' judges are giving lenders 30 days to fix their evidence or see these cases dismissed.
Stephen Bucha: The objective of the policy is to make sure that we are not granting a judgment based on one of these faulty affidavits, either now with our pending cases or in the future.
Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judges are now also requiring local attorneys representing loan servicers to sign their own affidavits every time they file a foreclosure case. The forms would put local attorneys on the hook, if their clients, the lenders, haven't done their homework making sure the notarizations are real and the facts are right. Bucha says state code already requires local counsel to do this, but the new affidavits, Bucha says, will help the court be doubly sure the information in foreclosure documents is accurate.