DS News - Bank of America

10 Prior to joining e Wolf Firm, Janaya L. Carter served as a managing attorney of a prominent mortgage banking law firm based in the Northwest with offices throughout the country. Carter has spent the majority of her 17 years in practice handling residential civil litigation, with particular emphasis on evictions, bankruptcies, non-judicial foreclosures, and judicial foreclosures. Carter has been called upon to speak at a variety of mortgage industry events, including the Legal League 100. She is considered by her peers to be an experienced leader that constantly demonstrates impeccable knowledge of the law, unparalleled litigation expertise, and an ability to execute regardless of the circumstance. What are the most important trends and challenges facing default servicing and the attorneys working in that space? Especially in Washington and Oregon, our default rates are extraordinarily low, so the challenge facing firms is maintaining a strong employee base and also possibly diversifying into different areas. During my career, I have seen some traditional servicing functions that servicers handled when I started shifted over to firms such as ours. Managing your team and ensuring you have the proper technology in place to deal with the more administrative functions of handling things like evictions, bankruptcies, and foreclosures is becoming more and more important in our industry, just to offset the added overhead costs. Washington and Oregon have seen a unique challenge over the past few years in that we've seen a lot of trustee litigation that now has started to come to a resolution, and there were a lot of business expenses associated with defending that. ere were some ques- tions about the interpretation of the statute dealing with non-judicial foreclosures. at's resolved to some extent, but that has, in the last few years, been a big challenge. On the Oregon front, the state has traditionally been a non-judicial state, and we saw a large-scale conversion to judicial over a four- or five-year period of time. e influx of that into the court system was a huge challenge. We are now getting back to business as usual, but it took a long time to return to that. What are some of the other challenges and opportunities a low-volume environment presents? ere was a time when a firm would typically have a paralegal, maybe a legal assistant, and an attorney, and all of those people were providing all of the functions related to a particular case from start to finish. Now, we're having to consider whether we have a solid technology platform and whether we can break some of those functions out from the team that are better served through automation. Technology is a huge focus in enhanc- ing how efficient we are, in reexamining our processes to ensure they make sense, and in helping to offset some of the increased func- tions that law firms are having to handle. Where is the default side of the industry innovating in terms of technological processes? Oregon and Washington have been very focused on the pre-foreclosure mediation process—getting out in front of the foreclosure and having the borrower involved through that process. In Oregon, there is a portal that is accessible to any party going through the mediation, and any documents that are discussed, any documents that are actually being handled through the mediation process, are made available through that portal. ey can see everything that's being uploaded. at was a focus for the Oregon mediation program so that the borrower had visibility into documents that were being submitted by the servicer. It also has cut down on some of the back-and-forth that borrowers were experiencing when they were going through loss mitigation. Washington has also made some changes "Technology is a huge focus in enhancing how efficient we are, in reexamining our processes to ensure they make sense, and in helping to offset some of the increased functions that law firms are having to handle." COUNSEL'S CORNER LEARNING LESSONS FROM DIVERSE COURT CASES Janaya L. Carter Managing Attorney, The Wolf Firm

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