‘What Was Coming’

At the height of the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008, Phillip Robinson would arrive around 8 a.m. at Northwest Stadium, where more than 1,000 people were lined up to receive legal assistance and advice regarding their often-dire housing situations.

Robinson was there to help.

As then-executive director of the legal nonprofit Civil Justice, Inc., Robinson oversaw dozens of attorneys trained to offer volunteer legal help alongside other nonprofits. More than 1,000 attorneys would eventually go through the training co-sponsored by Civil Justice. According to some estimates, the number of homeowners facing foreclosure in the D.C./Maryland area at that time was more than 37,000. “You’re just there, answering questions—sometimes all day, sometimes in shifts,” Robinson recalls.

Robinson joined Civil Justice in 2004 after being hired by executive director Denis Murphy. When Murphy died unexpectedly the following year, Robinson found himself at the helm of the nonprofit.

“I wasn’t really hired to do litigation, but Denis passed away and suddenly I’m the only lawyer on staff,” he says.

Robinson took over Murphy’s caseload, which at the time focused mostly on mortgage fraud scams. Maryland had recently created the Mortgage Fraud Protection Act, and Civil Justice received grants to litigate a few test cases. “What we didn’t know in 2005 and 2006 when those cases were happening,” says Robinson, “was what was coming.”

If you help someone with their housing or debt collection problem, they’re going to come back.

Robinson describes his role as a kind of host in what would come to be called the Foreclosure Prevention Pro Bono Project. “I would go around, like at a restaurant, and ‘touch’ each table where the pro bono lawyers were meeting with the homeowners,” he says. “I would debrief with the homeowners, so they left with a roadmap, knowing what their options were, because at that point—in 2008, 2009, 2010—the biggest problem was that homeowners had no idea what they could do.”

At the same time, legislative changes were put in place throughout Maryland to help homeowners. Ultimately, says Robinson, “we were trying to negotiate some kind of exit from the property or a soft landing or modification to remain in the property. It was pretty complex.”

Robinson is quick to point out the contributions of others, such as their nonprofit partner Pro Bono Resource Center of Maryland; Chief Judge Robert M. Bell, who sent a letter to the Maryland Bar encouraging attorneys to participate; and U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, who often visited homeowners himself; not to mention the thousands of volunteer attorneys, housing counselors, and other nonprofit groups. Other states created similar programs in the years that followed. “This was a model that could be used to solve lots of problems,” says Robinson.

Civil Justice also focused on helping young attorneys “do well and do good” by showing them, through projects like the Foreclosure Project, how they could take on similar cases and still make a living.

“Denis used to say, ‘If you help someone with their housing or debt collection problem, they’re going to come back and be your client again and again,’” says Robinson. “They’ll remember you, and they’ll refer other people to you.”

When Robinson left Civil Justice in 2012 to work as a solo practitioner, he concentrated on mortgage and debt collection cases. Today he continues to handle those types of cases, but he has also begun to scale back his caseload. Recently he has begun working with out-of-state service members who have been wrongfully sued in the state of Maryland in civil disputes that Robinson argues violate the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act.

Although Robinson’s time at Civil Justice is in his rearview, the experiences he had while overseeing the organization left an impact. He recalls how, during the peak years of the housing crisis, he would try to offset his long work hours by spending time with his young children at a local park. “Neighbors and friends would ask, ‘How was your day?’ and I could say, ‘I stopped 10 foreclosures today’ or ‘I stopped 200 foreclosures this week.’ That was a pretty cool thing to be able to say.”

It reminds Robinson of Murphy’s mantra: “You can be successful in the law and do well, but you can also do good at the same time. A lot of other lawyers could be doing this, too.”