Florida is taking a new look at solving the foreclosure crisis in this state.
Based upon the tsunami of foreclosure cases filed in the Florida Courts, the Florida Supreme Court has directed by administrative order all 20 judicial circuits in the state to implement an infrastructure and a process for diverting foreclosure cases to mediation prior to taking up the case in the Circuit Courts of the state.
Mediation is part of a growing movement toward alternate dispute resolution. The Court process is formal, expensive, inefficient and totally inundated with foreclosure cases. The Florida Supreme Court found, after extensive research and examination. that homeowner defendants were coming to court for hearings on motions for summary judgment (one of the steps to conclude a foreclosure case) without ever talking with the plaintiff lender to find if there might be a way to work out the problems.
What the legal system and the government agencies have not been able to reconcile is the fact that the lender does not want the house back – the inevitable result of foreclosure. REO assets on the Bank’s balance sheet are not good for bank operations. And the homeowner does not want to lose his (her) home. There seems to be common ground here that might lead to a solution without a court-ordered foreclosure. Enter the mediation programs.
Mediation offers a totally different dynamic in dispute resolution from a formal court trial. In mediation, the mediator is not the decision maker. The mediator does not listen to evidence and then render a verdict or decision in the manner of a judge or even an arbitrator. The mediator is simply there to facilitate settlement negotiations between the parties in an effort to help the parties to settle their own dispute on terms that are agreeable to both of them. The process is informal, voluntary and totally confidential. Just as settlement discussions are not admissible in Court proceedings, all of the mediation process is confidential and may not be heard in court or in the newspaper.
In the event that the matter is not settled in Mediation, the case returns to its place in line in Court and continues through the Court system. But the purpose and the process of mediation is to resolve the issues right in the mediation room and to settle the case to the satisfaction of both parties.
I commend the Florida Courts for trying to streamline the process of dealing with the many foreclosure cases that are backlogging our Court system. With the application of the principles of mediation, the Courts will speed up the process of clearing the docket of cases while implementing a alternate dispute resolution system. In this type of case this is a real benefit to both the lender plaintiffs and the defendant homeowners. Everybody wins – not the usual response of government.
