Financial Litigation

With the current financial crisis, we've been involved in the most basic research regarding the causes and effects of operations at every level of the financial industry.

We have a team of underwriters conversant with residential mortgages, commercial loans and commercial properties, and mixed portfolios of assets.   Our underwriters have decades of experience in the financial industry, having worked for both national and local banks and thrifts.

We have a proprietary underwriting system that emulates the loan program guidelines for almost any type of loan within all financial institutes, guaranteeing that 

• we re-underwrite loans to the standards originally used,
• strict quality control standards can be applied to the underwriting process - we know what's allowed and what isn't, 
• all the written standards are considered, not just the ones one underwriter might follow and another may ignore, 
• information pertinent to exceptions can be captured and factored in to the loan re-underwriting process, giving the re-underwriter some latitude in the determination of the safety and soundness of the loan, while documenting all factors that may be considered, 
• tabulations on intermediate results can be generated, so everyone can keep track of the progress of the re-underwriting project, 
• complex samples can be implemented for the loans being re-underwritten, so that multiple types of analyses can be conducted.

We have a team of financial experts with Ph.D.'s and Master's degrees in Finance, Economics, Econometrics, Statistics, and Operations Research who can analyze the most complex deals and complicated operations.  Some of the types of cases we're currently engaged in include:

• Research for Investors on auctions, portfolios, securitizations, and commercial acquisitions
• Research for Insurers offering credit enhancements on securitizations
• Research in class actions on behalf of borrowers allegedly led into inappropriate loan products
• Research on title insurance, title insurance pricing, and damages in title insurance claims
• Research on grading or risk ratings by investment banks on large companies and their stock or bond offerings
• Quality of due diligence by ratings agencies, companies specializing in due diligence, and other types of financial ratings and reviews
• Adequacy of financial operations, such as servicing of residential loans and tracking of credit quality
• Evaluation of additional credit, interest rate, or operational risk due to correlations in holdings, sensitivity to interest rate or exchange rate fluctuations, or flawed internal audit procedures.

We are the first and only firm to testify in court regarding the admissibility of the use of properly designed samples for the review of large portfolios of loans and for the extrapolation of damages to a population of loans.