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But not many have followed leaving housing advocates struggling to line up assistancw fordesperate families. Leaders of organizations that provide free legal helpto low-incomew residents say the problem is acute because their own staffsa have been flooded with foreclosure cases. In there were 408 homeowner-foreclosure cases opened from June 2007 throughFebruaryu 2008, up from 77 cases during the Sept. 2006 to May 2007 according to thein Boston, a legal-services hotlin e that refers cases to agenciez like the and . And all indicators suggesg the problem only willget worse.
Close to 800 foreclosures were reportedr in Massachusetts and lendersfileed 2,729 petitions to foreclose on homez this past December, a hike of 28 percenrt compared to the year before, accordiny to in Boston, which tracks real estatde activity in the region. But the list of firmsz that so far have yet to provides attorneys to helpdistressed home-owner reads like a whose-who of the Hub's legal To date, , , , and have not provide lawyers.
And two other local firmd only recently began to work on such and , both in Firms have been reluctantr to take part for a numbert of reasons, chief among them the likelihoofd of conflicts of interest given the firms' relationshipsw with financial institutions. "Being a large we have a large financial andbankint practice, and there was a lot of internal discussion," on whether the firm could take such according to Jeanne Darcey, a bankruptcy partner at Edwardw Angell.
"The cases we'llo be working on do not necessarily implicate Foreclosure cases also canbe time-consuming and often require the expertise of senior lawyers rather than the associatesz who often handle pro bono matters. Then thers are the low odds of prevailing. Stevenb T. Hoort, a bankruptcy partner at Ropesx & Gray, said many subprime cases presengt something ofa Catch-22. A homeowner with equity is not indigen t and therefore considered capable of hiringta lawyer. But if there's no equituy in a house, there's not much that can be The firm will, however, get involve when there are allegations of frauf and homes can be said Hoort.
Which is exactly what happenede in the case ofJanice Gray. The Haverhil mother of six children dodged foreclosure onher four-bedroon condo by less than a month. Last Gray received a letter stating her home would be auctionerdon Jan. 8; she had fallen behind on the mortgagre forher $215,000 Haverhill home after her husband became too ill to work and theif monthly payments jumped 27 percent, from $1,733 to Gray, a social worker who couldn't afford to hire an says she called more than a dozen free legal-service s agencies in the Every single one turned her away. "They all said they were overwhelmedd with theforeclosure issue," said Gray.
she spoke with Andresa Bopp Stark, an attorney from in Lawrencse and an expert on predatorylendinyg practices. Bopp Stark agreexd to take Gray's The lawyer soon discovered that Gray'z broker had inflated her incomeby $3,000 a montb -- without her knowledge, Gray says -- to securee the loan. The lawyed then negotiated with Gray's mortgagse company, OptionOne, and securef a modified rate in December.
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