Mortgage mediation.

The recommendation of the Florida Supreme Court committee to abandon the current statewide, mandatory residential foreclosure mediation program should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the operation of the program.

I am referring, of course, to the mediators who have sat through thousands of mediations and would bear witness to what has actually gone on--if only they could. The analysis offered by the committee to support its recommendation--a low rate of settlement --suggests how poorly conceived was the entire program and how little the committee understands the idea of mediation.

There is only one group that has benefitted from the enormous investment in time, resources, and money made by the Supreme Court in its mediation program--banks and other lenders. There is nothing in the mediation program itself that benefits homeowners. The explicit intention of the mediation program was to quickly and efficiently move the flood of foreclosure cases through the judicial system while providing homeowners a stop along the way to see if they could work something out with their lender. The explicit motive for the court's intervention in the foreclosure "emergency" was the assertion that "Florida's economy will continue to be depressed as long as there are massive numbers of mortgages that have not been resolved by foreclosure." Why is that a concern of the court? What about the hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children being dispossessed of their homes?

The mediation session was touted as a negotiation between the homeowner, who was presumed to be in default on her mortgage, and the lender. In order for the negotiation to be productive, the borrower and the lender were required to provide certain information prior to the mediation session. The homeowner was required to attend, with or without a lawyer; the lender's lawyer was required to be present while the lender's representative could appear by phone. The homeowner was required to have full authority to settle: The lender's representative was to have reviewed the borrower's documents and be in a position to negotiate a resolution, which, according to the mediation order entered by the court, included the authority to modify the terms of the mortgage. The moment the mediation began, and there is controversy about when it actually begins, the entire process begins to resemble Alice in Wonderland. Nothing that takes place in the mediation ever sees the light of day because the...