Welcome to the first Monday in a month of madness. Here are some news items to get your week started.

– Wrongful foreclosures on military members exceed estimates.

– Do the opponents of Proposition 8, which would ban same-sex marriage in California, have standing?

– Red-light camera company faces storm of corruption allegations in the Windy City.

– Michelob maker mounts media campaign amid lawsuits alleging the company waters down its beer.

Welcome back. Here’s a rundown of what’s happening in the legal world:

• In civil suit, the lawyer repping the man killed by Baltimore City Police Officer Ghaiji Tshamba will focus on the officer’s disciplinary record.
• Banks continue to be in the hot seat over the foreclosure crisis. Did some banks wait to alert regulators about loans going south?
• New York man allowed to sue his county for the cost to rent a Ferrari.
• Judge-directed negotiation could curb increasing malpractice costs in healthcare.
• Did it happen the way we think it did? Listening in on LBJ’s civil rights conversations.
• Maryland’s ACLU is questioning a petition to overturn the DREAM Act.

Juan Williams made the headlines last week speaking at Maryland Volunteer Lawyers Service’s pro bono reception. But almost all of what Williams said about the NPR controversy was to reporters after he gave a keynote address that looked at the value of pro bono work through the story of Thurgood Marshall, which Williams himself has told.

Williams talked in his speech about the influence of Charles Hamilton Houston, Marshall’s dean at Howard University’s law school who became a mentor and friend. Two of Houston’s sayings became mantras of sorts for Marshall as he pursued the civil rights cases that made him a household name:

• All people need good lawyers when their lives are on the line.
• A lawyer who is not a social architect is nothing but a social parasite.

Karl-Henri Gauvin was honored by MVLS as its volunteer of the year. Gauvin, a Baltimore solo practitioner, has handled 44 pro bono cases since 2008, primarily foreclosures. That Gauvin has so many foreclosure cases to work on in the first place is why he called the honor a “mixed blessing.” But Gauvin described the pro bono cases as a natural extension of his public policy background.

“Once you get your hands dirty, it’s very rewarding,” he said.

Connie Hare and Gary Greenblatt often see the rewards from pro bono cases more clearly than from their regular cases. The husband and wife team, of Mehlman, Greenblatt & Hare LLC in Baltimore, were honored as law firm of the year for taking 15 bankruptcy cases from MVLS this year and 58 total since 1993.

The couple has seen the impact of helping a pro bono client get rid of creditors and end up in a better place financially and mentally.

“They have hope now,” Hare said.

Both described the work as an obligation and “the least you can do” to give back.

MVLS also honored three lawyers – Thomas R. Simpson Jr., Elva E. Tillman and Randy S. Wase – for taking at least one pro bono case in each of the last 10 years.

(Full disclosure: The Daily Record was a media sponsor for the event.)

As you might imagine, we’ve been talking an awful lot about the recent foreclosure kerfuffle here at The Daily Record — wondering where the story might go, who it might affect next and what the implications are for the lawyers who let their notaries sign affidavits for them.

At our weekly law staff meeting Wednesday morning, I mentioned that if high schools kept parent signatures on file, I might have gotten into a lot of trouble back then.

Chalk it up to teenagers being teenagers, but I was chronically late and I occasionally signed my mom’s name to notes excusing me from being tardy. (Forget dad’s signature, I could never replicate his scribbled mess.)

Mom even authorized it at times when I was running out the door for school the day after being home sick and she was running out to work. Guess we both have the late gene.

OK, so I signed an absence note once or twice my senior year for a cut day with my girlfriends, but it never got worse than that. Certainly not on the same level as signing an affidavit — sworn testimony — for someone else.

Most lawyers I’ve talked to think the affidavit situation is totally inexcusable, but is there ever an occasion where authorizing someone else to sign for you would be acceptable?

• You can stop googling — the results of the Maryland bar exam aren’t out yet.
• The writer of last week’s City Paper piece on Willie Featherstone, a former law clerk, was fired last year for speaking to the media about the mistaken release of an inmate who impersonated another inmate.
• Mexico is eagerly watching California’s marijuana law vote.
• Sandra Day O’Connor wants to keep campaign cash out of courtrooms.
• Be careful what you put in those liner notes. Just ask the band Cheap Trick.
• When a photo-op causes a slipped disk, it’s probably a bad idea.

During the foreclosure crisis, much of the attention has focused on the people who have lost their homes.

But what about the purchasers of the foreclosed properties faced with what 50 state attorneys general – including Maryland’s Douglas F. Gansler — say is the real possibility that those foreclosures contained paperwork errors?

The situation illustrates why buyers should always insist on having their own title insurance coverage, rather than relying on the title policy the lenders insist they purchase, says real-estate attorney Lawrence S. Conn, of Baxter, Baker, Sidle, Conn & Jones PA in Baltimore.

“This is exactly the type of title defect that title insurance is designed to protect,” Conn said of paperwork errors in the foreclosure process.

The lender’s title policy, though, protects only the lender. Anything beyond that, such as the buyer’s down payment, would require an owners’ title policy, which is only marginally more expensive.

A buyer neglects this added coverage at his or her own peril, Conn added.

“Make sure that in this climate, [purchasers] certainly have title insurance,” he said.

One voice we could not fit into today’s story about the changes to the state’s foreclosure law was that of the Foreclosure Prevention Pro Bono Project.

Since its inception two years ago, the project has placed more than 900 cases with volunteer lawyers across the state. More than 1,500 homeowners also have been advised through foreclosure solution workshops staffed by volunteer attorneys.

Jennifer Larrabee, manager of the project with the Pro Bono Resource Center of Maryland, said officials are still trying to determine how, if at all, its system will change under the new law. The workshops will continue, she said, but one possible alteration might be volunteer lawyers shifting their focus toward representing clients in mediation sessions, she said.

Larrabee supports the new law but said it does not lessen the need for volunteer lawyers.

“The intention behind the law is that homeowners be provided a face-to-face, meaningful opportunity to meet with the lender and negotiate with someone with decision-making authority,” she said.

Caroline Farrell did not meet David Gaudin while in Mississippi earlier this month with the Maryland Law Katrina Project. But when a foreclosure attorney from the Mississippi Center for Justice shared with her Gaudin’s story, Farrell knew she needed to help a stranger.

Gaudin has terminal cancer; doctors give him less than six months to live. His illness forced him to stop working, and he subsequently fell behind on his mortgage. Wells Fargo, Gaudin’s bank, threatened to foreclose on his home. Gaudin and his foreclosure lawyer rejected the bank’s proposed loan modification late last year – three months’ forbearance followed by a large, balloon payment.

The bank now wants to move forward with foreclosure proceedings against Gaudin after rejecting his request for a loan modification because of an outstanding balance of $650 on his account.

“This is so heartbreaking,” Farrell said. “It seems so egregious that the bank can’t be flexible.”

That the sticking point was a couple hundred dollars also bothered Farrell, a 3L and president of the Katrina Project.

“I said, ‘We could raise this in an hour,’” she said.

She’ll have three hours to do it Friday night beginning at 9 p.m. at Quigley’s Half-Irish Pub near the law school. All proceeds from the $10 admission fee will go toward erasing Gaudin’s outstanding account balance. Farrell and her classmates have been spreading the word through listservs and Facebook, and Farrell is confident the event will raise more than enough money for Gaudin.

(Farrell said donations can also be made online by writing “The campaign to save David’s house” in the comments section.)

As for the beneficiary, Farrell said Gaudin cried upon learning what the Maryland students were doing for him. He’s now in regular contact with Farrell, a stranger no more.

In my story Monday about Baltimore County Circuit Court, I mentioned that foreclosure filings have inundated clerks’ offices at courthouses around the state, and that Prince George’s County has led the state in foreclosures for at least two years.

Unfortunately, I was unable to obtain foreclosure statistics from the clerk’s office in Prince George’s County by my deadline. But I received the data yesterday, and it’s startling.

In 2006, the clerk’s office received 4,148 filings. (That’s more than Baltimore County has ever received.)

In 2007, the clerk’s office in Prince George’s received 7,019 foreclosure filings.

In 2008, the clerk’s office received 8,237 filings.

This year, through Sept. 30, the clerk’s office has received 9,389 filings – and they are projecting 12,000 for the entire calendar.

Obviously, on an individual and family level the increase in foreclosure filings is bad news. But what does it say about the economy as a whole? Are we flushing out all of the toxic mortgages on the road to recovery? Or has news of the recession’s demise been greatly exaggerated?

Possibly when he or she lives for more than a year in a half-million dollar home while paying next to nothing.

In “Rescue is quirk of timing” in Wednesday’s edition of The (Baltimore) Sun, the lead anecdote is Veronica Peterson, a 45-year-old single mother of three who says she can’t keep up with the mortgage payments on a $545,000 house in Columbia. She says she expects an eviction notice any day. The story presents her as a victim of the foreclosure crisis.

However, that’s apparently not the full story. I’ll let the City Paper explain:

…in the comments section below the article, hundreds of readers pointed out what the Sun’s reporters and editors could not, apparently: that Peterson had no business in that house, and that she’s lived there for more than a year rent- and mortgage-free. “Where do you think we can get in on this deal?” one commenter, calling himself Henry Bowman, asked another.

The City Paper goes on to dissect the loan numbers:

The online court and land records show that Peterson closed on the house on Nov. 3, 2006, with two loans from Washington Mutual. The main mortgage, for $436,000, had a starting interest rate of 8.5 percent, adjusting in December of this year to the London Interbank Offered Rate plus 4.99 percent. The second loan, often called a “piggyback,” totaled $109,000 with an interest rate of 11.5 percent, according to The Sun.

Those two payments together would have totaled $3,386.17 per month. That’s before property taxes, upkeep, utilities, etc. Peterson would have to earn at least $50,000 per year just to make her house payments.

But it appears that Peterson made few–if any–payments. The foreclosure was filed July 31, 2007. The balance on the main note then was $435,735.86, plus unpaid interest accrued from Jan. 1, 2007, plus $1,005.72 in late charges. This suggests that Peterson made, at most, one payment on her house: the December, 2006 payment. Given the grace periods typical in home-mortgage business, it is at least as likely that her first payment was not due until January 2007, which would mean she has made zero payments.

Had she made all of her payments, Peterson would have spent about $64,335 so far. Had she rented a similar place, she would have been charged around $2,500 per month–a total of $47,500–since January 2007. Instead, she apparently paid nothing.

Not much of a “victim,” I’d say. I’m also shocked that someone would take out a mortgage for the full price of a home. Am I missing the down payment in this transaction?

JOE BACCHUS, Web Specialist