PS: Not Breaking..... But neither is this forum.

from Yves:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/09/m....

Quote:

I’ve been reluctant to take as strong a stand as their collective experience suggests, but independent evidence confirms their report. One little stunner came courtesy Alan Grayson’s office. In 2009, the Florida Bankers Association wrote a letter to the Florida Supreme Court objecting to some proposed rule changes for foreclosure cases. The full text of the letter is here. The critical section:

The reason “many firms file lost note counts as a standard alternative pleading in the complaint” is because the physical document was deliberately eliminated to avoid confusion immediately upon its conversion to an electronic file. See State Street Bank and Trust Company v. Lord, 851 So. 2d 790 (Fla. 4th DCA 2003). Electronic storage is almost universally acknowledged as safer, more efficient and less expensive than maintaining the originals in hard copy, which bears the concomitant costs of physical indexing, archiving and maintaining security. It is a standard in the industry and becoming the benchmark of modern efficiency across the spectrum of commerce—including the court system.

This is highly entertaining, because the excuse is “oh we destroyed the note, so our standard practice is to use a lost note affidavit.” If this was really as widespread as the Florida Bankers Association suggests, they are in a whole heap of trouble, because in most (if not all) jurisdictions, original notes with proper wet ink endorsements are required. And in states that are serious about proper procedure (South Carolina, for instance), judges are not going to have much sympathy with the use of a lost note affidavit when the note was destroyed.

... There's much more worth noting on her original post as linked.

PS:

In my opinion an electronic document today does not necessarily mean a PDF of an original or a singlke document scanned as a JPEG or other image. It's easy to compose a document from a dozen different sources use ANY scanned signatures where needed AND even include prompts for data entry of ad-hoc fields that can compose a document that is not necessarily the facsimile of an original.

BTW, Yves commented that she still doesn't believe the docs were destroyed despite the FBA letter because it's akin to burning money. Her real estate cohort Tom Adams shares the same view.