SCRA Compliance for Servicers and Foreclosure Counsel: Military Status Files That Hold and Remediating Void Sales

Keith S. Anderson, Partner | Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP

Keith S. Anderson is a partner in the Birmingham office of Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP, where he counsels financial institutions on compliance with the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA) and defends them when SCRA claims are litigated. His defense work centers on mortgage lenders and servicers in wrongful foreclosure, contested foreclosure, and servicing disputes in courts across the country, and extends to student loan and auto-finance lenders. A graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, he served as a Judge Advocate in the U.S. Air Force before entering private practice.

• Education & Credentials

Keith earned his J.D. with honors from The Ohio State University in 2004, where he was elected to the Order of the Coif and served as Articles Editor of the Ohio State Law Journal. He received his B.S. from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1998, graduating with academic, military, and athletic distinction.

He is licensed in Alabama, Georgia, Minnesota, Ohio, and Texas, and is admitted before the U.S. District Courts for the Northern, Middle, and Southern Districts of Alabama; the Northern and Middle Districts of Georgia; the District of Minnesota; the Northern and Southern Districts of Ohio; and the Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western Districts of Texas.

• Recognition & Leadership

The Birmingham Business Journal named Keith one of its “Veterans of Influence” in 2019, and he serves as Chapter President of the U.S. Air Force Academy Association of Graduates. He is listed in The Best Lawyers in America® for Labor Law – Management (2027) and in the Lawdragon 500 Leading U.S. Corporate Employment Lawyers (2026–2027), and was named an Alabama Super Lawyers “Rising Star” in Employment & Labor from 2013 to 2015.

• Professional Involvement

Keith has spoken at the American Conference Institute’s Residential Mortgage Litigation & Regulatory Enforcement Seminar and co-authored a 2012 analysis of the dismissal of a putative SCRA class action in Murphy v. Bank of America. He is a member of the Mortgage Bankers Association, the Conference on Consumer Finance Law, the Defense Research Institute, and the Alabama Bar Association, and an affiliate member of the Education Finance Council. He also writes on CFPB Regulation B and employment law developments for Bradley’s Financial Services Perspectives and Labor & Employment Insights blogs.

• Experience

Keith’s SCRA work spans regulatory guidance and litigated defense. He represented Wells Fargo in its consent order with the Department of Justice concerning SCRA compliance and auto repossessions (United States v. Wells Fargo Dealer Services, C.D. Cal.). He obtained a Rule 12(b)(6) dismissal of a putative SCRA class action in Murphy v. Bank of America (N.D. Ala. 2012), and secured summary judgment on two of three SCRA claims in Celestin v. Specialized Loan Servicing, LLC (S.D. Fla. 2014), which resolved before trial.

His foreclosure and title work includes a unanimous jury verdict after a three-day wrongful foreclosure trial in DeFranceschi v. GMAC Mortgage, LLC (Tarrant County, Tex. 2011); an equitable bill of review vacating a prior default judgment in Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. v. Khyber Holdings, LLC (Harris County, Tex. 2012); summary judgment as plaintiff in the title claim case Ocwen v. Chicago Title (Fulton County, Ga.); and summary judgment in ejectment defeating wrongful foreclosure claims in Federal National Mortgage Association v. Ethredge (Jefferson County, Ala. 2014). He has won dismissal or summary judgment in numerous wrongful foreclosure, quiet title, and slander of title cases in Alabama, Georgia, Minnesota, and Texas, several of them affirmed by the Eighth Circuit.

Across his financial services docket, Keith handles claims and advises clients under TILA, RESPA, HOEPA, the FDCPA, and the FCRA, along with predatory lending, lender-placed insurance, loan repurchase and investor disputes, Texas home equity loans, bankruptcy adversary proceedings, and class actions, including summary judgment on a RESPA provision in Kirby v. Caliber Home Loans, Inc. (N.D. Ala. 2017) and dismissal of a putative nationwide class action in Carr v. Ocwen Loan Servicing, LLC (N.D. Ga. 2017). He also represents employers in litigation under the FLSA, ADA, ADEA, and FMLA. As an Air Force Judge Advocate, he handled dozens of courts-martial and administrative boards as both prosecutor and defense counsel.

SESSION 1 – Building the Military Status File and Signing the SCRA Affidavit in Foreclosure | Keith S. Anderson | 12:00pm – 1:00pm

This hour follows one loan from referral to post-sale confirmation. It treats the military-status file as the evidence behind the 50 U.S.C. § 3931(b)(1) affidavit. The core questions are how certain the status proof must be before signing, and which contrary information in the file forces an “unable to determine” filing or an escalation instead of a second DMDC-only statement. Attendees leave with a milestone re-check matrix covering judicial and nonjudicial timelines and a sign-or-escalate checklist that rests on name-matching rules, date-of-interest queries and the lapse math under § 3953(c).

BREAK | 1:00pm – 1:10pm

SESSION 2 – Remediating an SCRA-Violative Foreclosure Judgment or Sale for the Servicer | Keith S. Anderson | 1:10pm – 1:40pm

This session starts the day a servicer learns that a protected borrower’s loan went to default judgment or to sale. It sorts the defect into one of two paths: a judgment entered on a deficient affidavit under § 3931, or a nonjudicial sale inside the § 3953 window without a court order that the statute makes “not valid.” It then shows how the path, the holder of title and the opponent drive the choice among vacatur, rescission of the trustee’s deed and cash compensation. Attendees leave able to size and structure an offer against the 2012 DOJ SCRA servicing agreements, allocate exposure between servicer and foreclosure counsel, and scope a portfolio look-back whose record also serves as the exam record. Attendees also leave with a remediation triage decision tree and an annotated remediation term sheet.