Q: Can attorney represent trust & mortgage servicer.Does servicer respond to summons or can trustee answer both summon com
I served 2 summons complaints, one on Ocwen Loan Servicing and second on U.S Bank, NA as Trustees resident agents who were different companies who had different names and addresses. The attorney for U. S. Bank, NA as Trustee is representing both Ocwen Loan Servicing and U.S. Bank on two separate summons complaints that both appear on courts docket. This seems to be unethical misconduct and a conflict of interest.
A: It depends on whether the defendants have a potential or actual conflict of interest, which most often arises if their positions are contradictory, such as where one of them wants you to lose and the other wants you to win or when one impleads for damages from the other for your claims. If you think you are going to take on U.S. Bank and Ocwen simultaneously pro se, you must be planning to lose, right? Do I guess correctly that this is a foreclosure defense, and both Ocwen and US Bank seek to have your rights foreclosed and for a judgment against you? If so, a conflict of interest would be fairly rare.
A:
Attorneys can appropriately represent more than one defendant in a given case (or for that matter more than one plaintiff), so long as the parties represented by the same attorney don't have claims or conflict involving each other. What an attorney cannot do is represent parties on two different sides of the same case (E.g, a plaintiff and a defendant in the same case).
Your post does not elaborate on why you suspect there is a conflict of interest, but at the end of the day if two or more defendants chose to hire the same attorney, that is on them and it is hard to see why that would be a matter to the plaintiff.
A: It is not necessarily a conflict, and if so, it can likely be waived. It is not the type of thing that you can take advantage of since you are not adversely affected. It is a common mistake to think that a lawyer's ethical obligations to others can be used to advantage by an adverse party. If there is a conflict, and it is not properly waived, then it is the mortgage company and servicer that may have causes of action against the lawyer.
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