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Homeowner clients of Bander Law Firm ‘doomed’ from start

FILIPINO and Korean homeowners listen to one of the lawyers representing a few of the former Bander Law Firm clients who alleged that the BLF did little or nothing to their cases after paying the firm an average of $8,500 only to lose their homes to foreclosure.

Lawyer ‘embarrassing’ emails between Bander and associates

HOMEONERS who lost their homes to foreclosure at the height of the mortgage crisis had a fair chance of keeping their properties had they not hire the wrong lawyer.

This came to light after email exchanges between the owner of the Bander Law Firm (BLF), Atty. Joel Bander, and his staff exposed the alleged low quality of work that the BLF did to its clients, some of whom were Filipinos, Koreans and Armenians.

Unearthed by BALITA MEDIA, the controversial and revealing emails within the BLF were actually part of the evidence submitted by a BLF associate, Atty. Tim Umbreit, in a motion he filed to rescind a court order against him. Umbreit’s motion was in response to a case filed by a couple that asked the court to disgorge all fees paid to the BLF in the amount of $20,000. Umbreit, according to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Northern District of California, had ignored scheduled court hearings earlier.

Umbreit cited that the “disorganization and chaos” at the BLF should’ve been considered in granting his motion for reconsideration. The BLF filed for bankruptcy on Feb.12, 2010, Umbreit said, which he “mistakenly believed” that all actions against the BLF – him included – were stayed as a result of the bankruptcy. His motion was denied and Umbreit, whose conduct the court ruled was “unprofessional and well below any standard of care” was ordered to pay $5,000.

Through the emails within the Bander Law Firm, Umbreit exposed what the court said was the “disorganization and chaos” inside the firm that Umbreit later described led to its “deterioration and eventual bankruptcy.”

In one of the emails dated Aug. 12, 2009, Umbreit said the BLF lawyers were “neophytes.” In that email addressed to Bander, Umbreit said their attorneys were “cheap not experienced or good (sic),” Umbreit also described the BLF lawyer’s quality of work as “shoddy, haphazard and below par” and that since joining the firm in March 2009, the law firm “never had a decent case or presented anything in a compelling way.”

Since they were “baby lawyers,” Umbreit urged Bander to provide them with “baby sitters.” Umbreit wrote “We don’t have the time to produce a quality product because we are scattered all over the place, apparently referring to Bander’s practice of assigning and reassigning lawyers and staff but without legitimate results. “Baby lawyers need babysitters,” Umbreit said.

Earlier, BALITA MEDIA published an article (in its weekend May 28, 2011 edition) that stated that Bander channeled his resources away from the homeowner clients’ cases to take care another case unrelated to mortgage litigation. Umbreit said Bander was obsessed with the case against BALITA MEDIA that Bander filed on behalf of a competing newspaper.  Umbreit said that although he joined the BLF to set up a bankruptcy practice for the firm, he, too, was dragged into the case against BALITA MEDIA.

Describing further the chaos in the BLF, Umbreit said that he had spent an “enormous amount of time to stem the tide of massive client defection.” He also wrote in an email to Bander that “I am embarrassed to take calls from other lawyers because of the poor quality of work we put out. The complaints are not well received and have been discredited time and again.”

But what was more revealing were the contents of an earlier email Umbreit sent to Bander dated Aug. 6, 2009, when he wrote that “Clients (homeowners) did not come in for BK (bankruptcy) and most were told that BKs are bad. Now we’re telling them they are good. BK is one of the most important decisions in a person’s life but we are pushing them into one at the last minute.” These were the same homeowners, some 800 of them, who paid the firm an average of $8,500 and were looking to sue their mortgage lenders. Many of them went to BLF after seeing full page ads of the firm in a Filipino broadsheet newspaper that told them to “Save Your Home. Sue the Banks!” to avoid foreclosure. Some of them were later forced to sue the BLF and also filed complaints with the California State Bar against Bander.

Yet in another embarrassing email, this one by a BLF staffer identified as Kaleb Liao to Umbreit, it was also revealed that non-attorneys were barking orders at attorneys. Dated Sept. 8, 2009, Liao wrote that experienced attorneys did not have the “temperament to be a babysitter to attorneys” and that “attorneys resented the fact that…a non-attorney would tell them what had to be done.” Liao identified the non-attorney only as “Carla” in his email.

Liao also disclosed in the same email that “All attorneys get the reminders of everything under the sky that is mortgage litigation related. If they chose to ignore (those), what can anyone do about that?”

Despite all these, however, Bander chose to blame the chaos in his law office on BALITA MEDIA, despite the fact that BALITA MEDIA exposed the plight of the homeowners in its articles beginning December 2009, or several months after the huge BLF mess was also already occurring within the firm.

(Rhony Laigo is the editor of Balita Media based in Glendale, California. He can be reached at rhony@balita.com. More Filipino-American news can be found at www.balita.com) ■

Bander lawyer spills the beans

INCOMPETENT?: Atty. Tim Umbreit (third from left in this photo that came out in a full page ad of a competing newspaper published in 2009), a former associate lawyer of the Bander Law Firm, owned by Atty. Joel Bander (fourth from left) testified that the cases in the firm were handled by “young and inexperienced associates” while “competent employees were let go.”

Attorney reveals cause of Bander Law Firm’s fall from grace

In 2009, the Bander Law firm placed weekly full page advertisings for several months in a broadsheet Filipino newspaper in Los Angeles about a loan litigation program that indicated to homeowners that they may be able to sue their lenders to save their homes during the home mortgage crisis.

Some 800 homeowners signed up. Each paid an average of $8,500, some paid higher for multiple properties. A $3,000 downpayment was required from each home owner. However, after a year of collecting fees from property owners, little if anything was done to their cases, according to complaints they filed with the California State Bar and in civil cases filed in Los Angeles courts.

The homeowners claimed they received no legal services and many lost their homes in foreclosure, while others alleged that the firm filed bankruptcy petitions on their behalf without their knowledge or permission. The homeowners also claimed that Bander law firm refused to return their money. 

When the intensity of these complaints became too much, the Bander Law Firm, through its main partner and 99% owner, Atty. Joel Bander, filed for bankruptcy in February 2010.

BALITA MEDIA, along with KFI 640 AM radio station, Glendale News Press, ABS-CBN’s The Filipino Channel, were some of the first to bring the Bander loan litigation controversy out to the public in late 2009. Starting in December, 2009, BALITA MEDIA ran a series of articles on several homeowners’ complaints that included Filipino and Korean property owners, which Atty. Bander blamed, in his bankruptcy hearing, as the cause of his law firm’s downfall.

However, recent Federal court filings showed that contrary to the claims of Bander, the real cause of his firm’s demise was mismanagement on his part because, according to an attorney named Tim Umbreit, who worked at the firm, Bander channeled all of his resources into a case he filed against BALITA MEDIA on behalf of a competing newspaper.

The revelations were made by Atty. Tim Umbreit in a motion for reconsideration to rescind a bankruptcy court  order that penalized him in the sum of $5,000 for his “willful” non-attendance at Bankruptcy hearings and his intentional “disregard“ of the court’s directive to appear in person in the case filed by a couple asking that the Bander Law Firm disgorge the $20,000 that they had paid to the law firm. (In legal terms, disgorgement is the act of giving up something such as the profits obtained by illegal or unethical acts on demand or by legal compulsion.).

In the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Northern District of California, September 30, 2010 decision, the court said Mr. Umbreit’s conduct was “unprofessional and well below any reasonable standard of care.”

In his declaration signed under the penalty of perjury, Umbreit disclosed that although he joined as an associate of the firm to handle bankruptcy cases back in March 2009, the firm was “inundated with Trustee Sales when I started at the Firm“ which he described as “both a procedural as well as an administrative nightmare.”

Umbreit said “My initial responsibility to set up a bankruptcy practice…was waylaid almost immediately,” adding the Bander’s workforce was staffed by “young and inexperienced associates.” The reason for this, Umbreit said, was Bander’s strategy to hire the least expensive young attorneys to do all of the work who had “no orientation, no training and no oversight.”

Umbreit also revealed that the firm was “inundated with emergency filings and constant shakeup of employees…competent employees were let go because they were not ‘responsive’ to Bander.” He added that “work environment was precariously close to hostile and turnover was a real problem.”

Umbreit added that “Cash flow became a constant concern that imposed on all the employees the added burden of cutting  costs, cutting overtime, and working on too many cases.” Umbreit said, “I was, quite frankly, overwhelmed and unable to handle the work load.”

But the most telling statement was Umbreit’s remark regarding Bander’s handling of the case against Balita Media. Umbreit said, “By August of 2009 (or months even before BALITA MEDIA came out with its stories in December 2009 on the Bander Law Firm), I was almost exclusively dealing with a case that ultimately brought the Firm down....”

“Bander was obsessed with the...case and had a personal involvement with the parties that far exceeded the bounds of any professional relationship. Bander had an obsession with an attorney named (James G.) Beirne and his client (Luchie) Allen (BALITA MEDIA’s CEO).”

Umbreit revealed in his motion that “From July through November, I was embroiled in (BALITA MEDIA) case at Bander’s insistence…Mortgage litigation and bankruptcies all took a back seat to the...case. In late August, I learned for the first time that the Firm was not being paid for handling of the case.”

Weeks after Bander withdrew from the case against BALITA MEDIA, the parties settled their dispute. The terms of the settlement remain private.

BALITA MEDIA called the law offices of Bander on Friday. Email messages were also sent to him for his reaction, but he has yet to present his side of the story.