A growing band of consumer lawyers have been pilgrimaging to a farm located in the depths of the North Carolina mountains to learn the secrets of fighting foreclosures by exploiting lenders’ flawed document trail.

O. Max Gardner III is their guru, dishing out advice in between his wife’s home-cooked meals and over single-malt Scotch.

His essential method revolves around finding holes in the process as the mortgages were securitized, like lost promissory notes and sketchy loan ownership tracking. Robo-signer foreclosure mills tried to cover up the errors with affidavits with false signatures on them and assigning mortgages after the fact.

599 people have gone through the program and afterward they stay in touch on a private email newsletter. By sharing documents and finding patterns of misconduct together, they’re able to take on some of the “tall building” law firms and keep their clients’ homes or get them sizable settlement checks.

One thing Gardner loves to do is let creditors hang themselves on their own documents.

“The more false documents and inconsistent documents I get the other side to produce, the more legal leverage I have against them.”

If you’re a homeowner facing foreclosure, you can find a consumer lawyer graduate of Max’s bootcamp in this roster.

Foreclosure Lawyers Go to Gardner’s Farm for Edge on Lenders [Bloomberg]

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