Mark P. Stopa

We heard of Mark from a raving review in the paper in 2006 and heard of his heroics of helping the “the little guy” stopping the bank from robbing people. Well.... we did what anyone who was in our situation would do we called him! We never even met with him we bet his paralegal. He never met with us... once. Mark Stopas advice was to throw ourselves from a current mortgage payment (which we were) into foreclosure ensuring we could win against a 1500.00 fee placed on our mortgage from homeowners. Approximately 6 months later we were in foreclosure. Though this went against everything that seemed right we trusted him with our home and 8 years later we have finally gone to trial and lost. Our family of 6 have nothing left but bad credit and no home. We did however pay him yearly ($1200 which increased yearly and ended at $1575.00) for what we don’t know. Bank offered $7000 to settle and we were told the night before trial and had no time to think about it we were not explained anything and we felt pushed into a decision we didn’t understand. He claims we didn’t pay him for 2 years and so he is taking $5000 for back pay (we can’t prove it but we paid him) he and told us we would get $2500. We are yet to see that and bank foreclosured months ago. We contacted him and his firm No call back, No response. We are convinced we won’t see that money at all. They do not explain anything and in 8 years we called emailed facebooked messages and in that time they returned a TOTAL of 3 calls. He was rude and combative. He was condescending using foul language to my husband and was completely unprofessional. We feel completely duped by this lawyer and his firm. We have 4 small children and could have used the money spent to pay him for his services in a better way to benefit our family. Not to mention had we gone straight to bank we might not have been foreclosed on and if we had we might actually see some of the settlement money. When we reported him to our trial judge after many attempts to contact him with no avail for not responding to us for a year he called us (yay) but only to say “he was pissed at us for reporting him” Stay in your home? Stopa for the homeowner? Not in our case. He made a lot of money off us and we are still yet to see a Penny and we lost our home. He seems like such a good guy until you sign the contract and pay him. We were duped hook line and sinker. Now we have to rebuild in 4 years we can buy a home again. We are a cash only family with no other debt. Wish we had never hired him and his firm. Unfortunately we referred others and 3 other friends had same problem. We feel terrible we did now. Our advice...Run!

My case was set for trial and I wasn't notified! After calling the bank to get a payoff figure to see if we could sell the house, the bank called me back to tell me trial was set. I ended up working with the bank myself to settle the matter. After the paperwork was signed, I finally heard from Sto...pa's office about the trial--they sent me a copy of the trial order, but no instructions or anything. After that, the bank filed a Notice of Dismissal and copied Stopa's office and they sent me a copy, and then 2 weeks later I got an email from Stopa advising me that I needed to appear in person at trial and gave me the WRONG TRIAL DATE. Fortunately I already knew what was going on, but it's a sad state of affairs. Unfortunately, I had recommended his firm to two of my friends, who are also having problems with both communication and refusal to pursue settlement.

I hired Mr Stoppa and after I paid the $4000, I could never get a hold of anyone and they never called me back. They did do work toward my foreclosre, but my situation was a little different than the norm so the work they did actually hurt my situation and since they never would call me back, I was n...ever able to discuss with them what they were doing on my case. 3 years later, I am still dealing with the foreclosure and they still will not return my calls. I am at a loss on what to do. I am disabled and have no money to hire another lawyer. I would be careful hiring them because in my case they took my money, never called me back and just steamed through my case without considering my specific needs.