Article Courtesy of The Tampa
Bay Times
By Susan Taylor Martin
Published
October 5, 2015
A Tampa law firm once under
investigation for allegedly filing false and misleading mortgage
documents is laying off 154 employees and closing its title company.
The law firm of Daniel C. Consuegra notified state officials of the
layoffs Wednesday in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or
WARN, letter.
Consuegra Title, with 28 employees, will permanently shut down starting
Nov. 30, the letter said, but the law firm will remain open. Neither
firm returned calls for comment.
The Consuegra law firm was among the so-called "foreclosure mills" hired
by banks to push through foreclosure cases after tens of thousands of
Floridians defaulted on their loans in the wake of the real estate
crash.
The Florida Attorney General's Office investigated the Consuegra firm
and seven others on allegations they had submitted bogus or misleading
documents to the court and used "robo-signers" to attest to the truth of
documents they never read.
The firms denied wrongdoing, and the investigation ended after the
Florida Supreme Court ruled that the state could not investigate law
firms under the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act as the
Attorney General's Office had tried to do. The Florida Bar maintained
that it had sole authority to investigate alleged misconduct by
individual attorneys.
The Bar could not immediately say whether any of Consuegra's lawyers had
been disciplined in connection with the problematic mortgage documents.
A graduate of Stetson University College of Law, Daniel Consuegra was
admitted to the Bar in 1983 and has had no disciplinary history for at
least the past 10 years, Bar records show.
Consuegra's law office and title company both operate out of a building
in east Tampa's Sabal Industrial Park that he bought for $2.1 million in
2012.
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