There are only 30 lawyers at Gibbs & Bruns, the Houston litigation boutique that orchestrated Tuesday’s $8.5 billion settlement between Bank of America and mortgage bond investors. But good things come in small packages. This deal, struck with the noteholders in 530 trusts that issued securities backed by Countrywide mortgage loans, would not have happened without Gibbs partner Kathy Patrick. She put together a coalition of major institutional investors that BofA’s trustee on the securitizations, Bank of New York Mellon, could not afford to ignore. Patrick sent a red-alert warning to the bank last October, by announcing publicly that Gibbs & Bruns and its bondholder clients were gearing up for litigation. That move alone sent BofA’s stock down five percent. Then Patrick worked with lawyers for BofA and BoNY to structure a novel deal that makes sense for all of them.
The settlement agreement submitted to New York state supreme court judge Barbara Krapnick Tuesday morning calls for BofA to pay Gibbs & Bruns $85 million if the settlement is approved. Patrick told OTC the firm has earned it. “We’re happy we’ll get paid for our work,” she said. “We’re very proud of this outcome.”
In a way, the roots of the BofA MBS deal are more than 10 years deep, dating back to when Gibbs & Bruns began representing a predecessor of the asset manager Black Rock in a Texas legal malpractice case that the firm eventually won at trial. Patrick’s relationship with Pimco, the gargantuan bond fund manager, goes back to 2003, when she was hired to bring suits against the banks that issued $2 billion in National Century Financial Enterprises securitizations. Pimco was one of the NCFE noteholders for whom Gibbs & Brun recovered more than $500 million.
