A new report on mortgage litigation suggests new servicing/lending rules are keeping legal departments across the mortgage industry busy in 2013.

And this observation is in line with a trend that Ghazale Johnson, a senior executive at Accenture Credit Services, spotted earlier this year.

Johnson told HousingWire a few weeks back that “everyone has been getting used to an unending list of regulatory requirements.”

The end result is an industry that is re-sizing and scaling itself to deal with a new era in lending and servicing; and it might as well be called the era of compliance.

She sees three areas of focus in the mortgage business in 2013 – cost, compliance and control.

One of the big issues is “having the appropriate staff on hand to interpret the regulations and ensure appropriate controls are put in place,” Johnson noted.

After the right people are in place, processes will change and firms will have to transition, factoring in the cost of hiring the right compliance staff and “putting in place the appropriate technology and automation to support the (CFPB requirements),” Johnson asserted.

But there’s no method to this madness or ‘silver bullet’ to help lenders and servicers get everything in order at once.

“There is not a tech product that can ever be a silver bullet to satisfy the strategic objectives of the lenders,” Johnson told HousingWire.

The big issue, she said, is ‘compliance is always on the table,’ making the hunt for products and solutions a significant trend for 2013 and an area that is generating a lot of potential job opportunities.

“It’s definitely a hot topic,” Johnson asserted.