Sink asks lawyers to help Floridians save their homes.

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Wearing a button with legal legend Chesterfield Smith's smiling face and his favorite phrase, "Be somebody and do good," Florida's Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink challenged The Florida Bar Board of Governors to do just that--by helping people save their homes during the foreclosure crisis.

"I know you have such an emphasis on pro bono service, but for me right now, I think really concentrating on these issues of foreclosures and subprime mortgages in every one of our communities in Florida, there can be no higher calling," Sink told the Bar's leaders meeting February 1 in Tallahassee.

"It's not like the old days when you got in trouble and you could just walk down the street to the bank that gave you the mortgage and negotiate with them or talk to them. These mortgages have been held by Lord knows who. They have been through so many iterations," said Sink, former president of the Bank of America.

"That's why it's critical that homeowners have to have legal advice. Once the lawyer gets in there and calls one of these KKR Atlantic ... or people who hold these mortgages, oftentimes something can be worked out.

But it literally has got to be a lawyer-to-lawyer conversation. You can't expect the man in the street to go up against some stranger somewhere, who is representing a mortgage holder who you have never even heard their name."

Florida is second only to California in the number of foreclosures last year, Sink said. [Florida had more than 165,000 total foreclosure filings in 2007, compared to California's 250,000, according to RealtyTrac, an online seller of foreclosure properties. And, according to the Office of the State Courts Administrator, real property and mortgage foreclosure filings in Florida's circuit civil courts increased 97 percent, from 57,272 in FY 2005-06 to 112, 840 in FY 2006-07.]

"This wave is expected to get worse instead of better, because many of the homeowners who took advantage of these subprime mortgages will just now this year, in literally the next six months or so, be subjected to the reset. They went into their mortgages with these very low teaser rates, with the understanding--well, I don't know if they understood or not--that there would be a huge bump-up, which will probably make their homes unaffordable for some of these families. And here we are in an economic environment with rising unemployment levels. There's some pretty bleak news out there," she said.

Earlier in the week, Sink...

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