Non Suit Yourself

We've asked before (rhetorically--we think) and now we ask it as part of the Blogosphere Bar Examination : "If you can't sue yourself, who can you sue?" This is a multiple choice question on the Multiple Mental State (one of which is Imaginary) Bar Examination. (It's like the question that a lawyer I knew once asked me: "If you can't sexually harass your secretary, who can you harass?"--only completely different. Hint: The answer (as they used to say on that TV program about the flying nun) is "none of the above.")

When we asked this question ,the case involved a grandmother who had custody of her granddaughter who she had negligently run over with the family van. She sued in her capacity as guardian of the child. The mother had disappeared and there was no other living relative. She sued herself as the negligent driver--hoping to get her insurance company to help pay some medical bills. So who can bring that lawsuit on behalf of the injured child? A local judge threw the case out on the basis that you cannot sue yourself, even if you hire two different lawyers to do it. If you won, you might be able to collect attorneys fees from yourself, or even punitive damages ! But that's New York.

You can sue yourself in Floriduh, thought. At least if you're a bank you can. Wells Fargo apparently does it in order to consolidate mortgages and clear title so it can foreclose on and sell off those fabulous real estate investments it lent money on (more than once) that are now selling in the high three digits (sometimes including the two to the right of the decimal point).

Why does the bank sue itself? Sarasota Foreclosure Attorney, Dan McKillop says: “The banks don’t take the time to properly file complaints. The same way they didn’t take the time to look at any of the homeowners info. The same way they didn’t take the time to properly assign the notes and mortgages. So, we’re basically in that process now, but it’s the plaintiff’s attorneys who are trying to push through these foreclosures as fast as possible.”

Banks that are too big to fail are apparently too big to know what they're doing, so they need to sue themselves so that the left hand knows what the non functional cerebellum is doing. Maybe this is in fact a clever strategy, or maybe, as a professor quoted by FOX Business suggested, "[t]his is just folks cranking out paperwork without conscious thought." O.K. , if the US governmint is willing to cough up money for you if you made some decision that costs your bank a gazillion or so dollars, do you really need to be conscious? Does your attorney --or can he just crank out papers like a crank ? Just as bad cases making bad law, bad mortgages can make bad lawsuits, it appears.

And the banks have to hire two different law firms to handle the cases, because the plaintiff bank Wells Fargo N.A. has interests that conflict with the defendant bank Wells Fargo N.A. So the bank, or the taxpayers who are bailing them out, have to pay to fund both sides of the lawsuit. But if they win the case they can make it all back from , from, from---themselves ! If this plan unexpectedly fails, and somehow winding up costing money, there's always the government.

See, the stimulus money is already stimulating something--more law suits!