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Understand Our Reasoning for Forming this Affiliation
In the summer of 2007, Aidikoff, Uhl & Bakhtiari; Maddox, Hargett & Caruso, P.C.; David P. Meyer & Associates Co., LPA; and Page Perry, LLC entered into an arrangement where we would prosecute mortgage-related claims against Wall Street as a group. Each of these regionally diverse law firms has extensive experience in arbitrating and litigating claims against Wall Street firms. At that time, it came to our attention that a significant number of individual and institutional clients were going to need attorneys to represent them from losses they were sustaining in complex, derivative mortgage-related investments. These investments are generally referred to as structured securities.
Structured securities are investments created by Wall Street that generate returns from underlying investments. By way of example, some common forms of structured securities are collateralized mortgage obligations (CMO), collateralized debt obligations (CDO), and asset backed securities (ABS). From 2001 through and including 2006, approximately $5.5 Trillion Dollars of subprime, Alt-A and home equity loans were made to individual home owners. These individual loans were then packaged into investments and sold to investors in various structured financial products.
As is easily determined from reviewing any of today’s major financial publications, many of these investment products are failing and reeking havoc in today’s financial markets. Given the sheer numbers of potential cases, the amounts involved, the complexity of the individual investments and the wherewithal of our Wall Street adversaries, each of our firms decided that it would be in our clients’ best interests to pool our resources and experiences to fight what we understand will be aggressive defenses by our Wall Street adversaries.
We know that we have the experience to understand and explain these complex, derivative investments. Furthermore, we know we have the ability to establish that these complex, derivative investments were built on the foundation of unreliable, if not fraudulent, assumptions. And we believe that we have the collective experience to establish that these exotic investments were often misrepresented to investors.
Since forming our group, many of the assumptions that we utilized in determining to work together have proven to be the case. We have contacted and hired various experts who are painstakingly helping us put our cases together against a number of Wall Street firms. While we still are in the infancy of this problem and the litigation that will emanate from these problems, we have already identified a number of areas that make the viability of claims against the Wall Street very strong.
In evaluating potential liability to investors by Wall Street Underwriters and/or Rating Agencies, it appears that the most viable claims to be asserted would focus on: (a) the adequacy of the disclosures that were provided to investors; (b) the adequacy of the ratings, by the Rating Agencies, on the investment created by subprime, exotic and high risk loans; (c) the valuations and appraisals, and systems therefore, of the underlying mortgages by the investment banks and/or the rating agencies during the “due diligence” and structuring phases of the investment; (d) the conflicted position of the Rating Agencies and the evaluation models that were utilized for both the initial formulation of their ratings and the subsequent monitoring of the same; (e) the business practices and procedures implemented by the Wall Street Underwriters, and reviewed by the Rating Agencies, in creating the pipeline for the subprime and high risk collateral utilized in creating Structured investment vehicles.
Our affiliation of lawyers is actively involved in advising individual and institutional investors in evaluating their legal options when confronted with subprime and other mortgage related investment losses. Contact us for a free consultation.
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