Becoming involved with mortgage rescue firms is rarely a good move.

The Bar's Ethics Hotline continues to receive calls from attorneys approached by companies or individuals calling themselves foreclosure-related rescue services, experts on loan modifications, or short sales consultants.

Some are offering to set up lawyers in offices or form partnerships with lawyers or hire attorneys as in-house counsels to represent clients.

Don't take the bait, warns Bar Ethics Counsel Elizabeth Tarbert, because each of those scenarios violates Bar rules.

Tarbert said lawyers can't take clients from most of these mortgage modification companies because they engage in practices that are prohibited for lawyers, like promising results in advertisements and directly soliciting potential clients. Tarbert said some nonlawyers expect to be paid for the referrals, some nonlawyers are using lawyers to get around statutory prohibitions for the nonlawyers, and some want to control the cases and the clients, which are prohibited under Bar rules.

"Usually, if it is a nonlawyer approaching you, it's bad news," Tarbert said. "If a nonlawyer is approaching you, it really is probably too good to be true, and you are probably going to end up in a situation where you are violating one or more of the rules."

While the numbers are not yet high, some Florida lawyers have become involved with these companies, said Arne Vanstrum, director of the Bar's Attorney Consumer Assistance Program, noting ACAP has received 100 to 150 complaints so far on "a handful of attorneys" involved with mortgage rescue companies.

"For instance, the attorney gets involved with these loan modification companies and once [the clients] stop getting communications back after they paid money, they get suspicious and then they start calling us," Vanstrum said. "It kind of trickles in like neglect or lack of communication, an I-want-my-moneyback type of thing. Sometimes, they do not even discuss that it is a foreclosure or loan modification type of problem."

For now, Vanstrum said, attorney involvement with these companies has been isolated. It's not uncommon, he said, for each lawyer mixed up with a loan modification company to generate up to 30 complaints.

"We don't know when a new one is going to pop up, but they do tend to be popping up," Vanstrum said. "And we know it is kind of trending northward in the state."

Vanstrum said it also is not uncommon for loan modification companies to regularly change their names and phone numbers to try to keep one step ahead of the...