In a decision earlier this month, the Court of Appeals of Maryland suspended a foreclosure attorney for 90 days for authorizing his notary employees to robosign and notarize his signature on foreclosure affidavits.  The decision mirrors the outcome in another disciplinary action against another Maryland foreclosure lawyer earlier this year.

After his firm saw a large increase in foreclosure work in the wake of the housing crisis, George Jacob Geesing, of BWW Law, formerly Bierman & Geesing LLC, instructed his staff to robosign and notarize large numbers of documents, including foreclosure affidavits.  Geesing claimed to have reviewed all the documents himself, and said that because he adopted the signatures as his own, he thought it was legal to authorize the staff members to sign documents.

In November 2009. the validity of several of these foreclosure documents were challenged in court by borrowers.  After consulting with his lawyer, Geesing halted the robosigning at his firm and notified his clients of the issue.   His firm dismissed and refiled some foreclosures and filed corrective affidavits in many more, and self-reported his violations to the Maryland Attorney Grievance Commission.

Geesing sought to have his punishment limited to a reprimand, but the disciplinary panel opted for a 90 day suspension, finding that Geesing's robo-signing caused great harm to the image of the attorney profession and to the operation of the courts.

In a similar disciplinary ruling earlier this year, Maryland attorney Thomas P. Dore also had his law license suspended for 90 days.  Dore, one of two majority stockholders at the law firm of Covahey, Boozer, Devan & Dore, P.A., had authorized hundreds, if not thousands, of foreclosure affidavits to be signed in his name by others over a period of approximately two years.  These documents were then notarized.  Dore claimed to have been under the impression that having others sign for him was legal as long as he authorized them. 

In 2010, a judge privately told Dore that he had become aware of stark inconsistencies in Dore's signature on these documents, and would report him to the bar if he did not self-report to the Maryland Attorney Grievance Commission.  Dore claimed that up until that time, it had never occurred to him that his signature was being notarized on these affidavits.  Dore immediately saw to it that the robosigning in his name was halted, began taking corrective actions, and about a month later he self-reported his ethics violations to the commission.

Dore claimed that when his firm began receiving a high volume of foreclosure work after the housing bust, it became impossible for him to sign all of the documents, but he still wanted his name to be on all the documents for the protection of his employees.  He recalled that one of his employees had received threatening phone calls from a retired police officer whose home was in foreclosure. During the call, the ex-cop indicated that he knew where the employee lived, her home phone number, and her daughter's address and telephone number, and threatened to kill the employee, her daughter, and her co-workers.  So he authorized employees to sign his name on the foreclosure affidavits.  He claimed that all of the affected affidavits had been reviewed by an attorney, although not necessarily himself.

Dore's firm ended up filing corrective affidavits in many foreclosures at its own expense.  Some foreclosures were dismissed and refiled.

In both cases, the court reviewing the ethics violations found that the attorneys had no selfish motive for the robo-signing-- they merely wanted to expedite service for their clients.