Why Select Us?
In today’s Financial Services environment, The PHOENIX Attorney Group is leading an effort to raise the bar of how lawyers can provide assistance to the financial world. We created The PHOENIX Group as a national network of full service law firms that aims to offer the highest quality in legal services, covering the gamut from issues related to complex litigation and creditor rights representation. Our inspiration for forming the PHOENIX Attorney Group was two-fold: First, we wanted to offer the loan servicing community a place where they could find competent, vetted counsel who never had anything to do with any of the industry scandals or fraudulent billing practices that many attorneys have succumbed to over the past ten years. Secondly, we wanted to create a risk free attorney selection process.
Currently there are no attorney groups or organizations that make use of regulatory criterions or internal audits to drive membership standards. Unfortunately, the major organizations are so political in their leadership and operational mechanics that there is nothing substantive that a loan servicing executive, attorney network/vendor manager can rely on when selecting a new law firm. In fact, the two largest organizations contain members who have engaged in robo-signing, and other scandalous behaviors. These organizations have no transparent processes where their members are examined and/or required to re-certify their memberships each year. As a result, the attorney selection, vetting and surveillance process has become the single most critical aspect of any loan servicing company’s vendor management efforts. If we know anything, we know this: “The regulators mean business.” The CFPB and OCC in particular has set a host of third party vendor requirements and risk elements that must be examined and verified by a regulated financial institution that elects to use third party vendor services. The Attorneys General Settlement Agreements and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac set similar requirements. The PHOENIX Group views these and other such requirements as a mandatory membership template. We pre-audit firms that seek membership and reexamine them each year thereafter. Firms that fail these audits or engage in behavior deemed a risk element under the afore-mentioned criterions will have their membership terminated. The company is structured so that nothing interferes with this protocol. The Board Member politics and “good old boy” cronyisms that we witness in other organizations do not exist in our network. The fundamental motivators are ethics, excellence, and transparency. We offer a simple and powerful solution to this situation.
The bottom-line is that The PHOENIX Group will never contain all of the principled legal practitioners, but we guarantee that when a financial services company selects one of the members of our network, they will find one of the finest legal practitioners in their state and the mortgage banking attorney community.