by Mike on March 18, 2010
The MERS Conveyance The heart of your mortgage – the most important clause in the entire document – is the “Transfer of Rights in the Property” clause. This is the language that creates the lender’s security interest backing the loan – it’s the sentence that allows them to foreclose if the borrower doesn’t pay. But […]
by Mike on March 11, 2010
Your mortgage is a thick, dense, practically unreadable document that dictates many of the terms of the relationship between the borrower and the lender on a typical home loan. The document itself is written by the bank’s lawyers, and most of them tend to use specific language that has been tried-and-true in other deals. In […]
by Mike on February 25, 2010
Locked out Imagine this: you’re on a two-week vacation. You come back, and find a notice on your door: Entry by unauthorized persons prohibited. Alarmed, you try your key in the lock – it doesn’t fit. You peek through the windows and see that everything you left behind is gone – your furniture, your clothes, […]
by Mike on February 22, 2010
Car rental companies hate me. Whenever I rent a car, before I sign that two-sided, extra-long, faint-colored fine-print contract of theirs, I sit and read it, so I know what I’ve agreed to. Now, I’ve been a lawyer for fifteen years. I can say I understand those contracts almost all the time. But the average […]