I don’t know if anyone else is getting this impression but I’m hearing a distinct sense of schadenfreude in the coverage of the foreclosure mess, particularly from lawyers.
If you’re not aware of it over the last fifty years or so there has been a steady erosion of tasks that used to be performed by attorneys and, indeed, used to constitute the bread and butter business for many, particularly solo practitioners. These chores include real estate closings, some aspects of the banking and insurance businesses, most recently ordinary wills, and foreclosures all of which used to require the attention of attorneys but are now often conducted without them and, in the case of non-judicial foreclosures, without even a review by a judge. I don’t hear as much resentment from lawyers over this state of affairs as I used to but I suspect it’s still there.
And when I hear a lawyer talk about the foreclosure mess on the radio or on television I have frequently detected an undertone of “Well, what do you expect from letting non-lawyers handle things that should be solely the province of the experts?”
Yet, there have seemed to be more than a few lawyers implicated in foreclosure-gate, and how many of those bank officers have j.d.s? Giannoulias can’t be the only one.