Professor David Engstrom weighs in with Peter Eavis in The New York Times – Deal Book on what it means if the government declines to intervene in a case against U.S. Bank. 

When Hayward Ferrell of Huber Heights, Ohio, fell behind on his mortgage payments several years ago, his bank did not meet with him to try to work out a plan to make the loan easier to pay, he says.

“They never sat me down and said, ‘It looks like you are going to lose this, so why don’t you do this?’ ” he said. “They never did that.” The lender, U.S. Bank, foreclosed on the house in 2009.

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But U.S. Bank can gain confidence that it will prevail if the Justice Department continues to decline to intervene in the case, according to specialists in False Claims Act cases. David Freeman Engstrom, a law professor at Stanford, has done research that shows that 90 percent of the cases that the government never joins end in dismissal. “So it doesn’t look good that the D.O.J. has declined,” he said in an email.