Mortgage-related lawsuits are on the rise, with homeowners and investors alike suing over allegedly being duped by the mortgage industry.

According to a litigation report from MortgageDaily.com, an online mortgage news analyst, the number of mortgage-related lawsuits filed in the first quarter of this year jumped to 81, a more than 50 percent increase from the 50 cases tracked during the same quarter in 2008.

Cases tied to foreclosures, including actions against foreclosure-rescue firms, jumped to 12, triple from the four cases in the prior period. Lawsuits filed by mortgage-backed securities investors also increased, from four to 13, which pushed investor class actions to 21 cases -- the most of any type.

No surprise, said attorneys involved in mortgage banking regulatory matters.

"Is this expected? Yes. A trend like this is not uncommon when what you're talking about is, essentially, the aftermath or effects of an industrywide crisis, " said Michael Waldron, a partner in the Dallas office of Washington's Weiner Brodsky Sidman Kider, which helped prepare the mortgage litigation report.

"The question I think you have is the timing [of the litigation]," Waldron said. "What we're seeing is the dust beginning to settle. I'm not contending that the crisis is over. But what I would suggest is that the dust is beginning to settle. People are beginning to kind of poke their heads out from the bunker, and they have allowed themselves some time to evaluate the landscape."

That evaluation, he noted, has resulted in litigation, both by investors who felt that they were misled by the mortgage industry, and by homeowners who are trying to stay in their houses, claiming that banks and lenders took advantage of their lack of knowledge of the industry.

"You are seeing folks say, 'Look. I know where I stand. Now I need to essentially go out and mitigate by proportionately setting out allegations of blame elsewhere," he said.

On the foreclosure front, Waldron said that the lawsuits share a common thread: " 'The loan was unlawful, and it shouldn't have been made to me in the first place. It was made knowing that I was not in the position to understand the terms. And even if I was in the position to understand the terms, I was not in the position to make good on those terms.' "

Waldron, meanwhile, defended the mortgage industry, saying, "While the last couple years has certainly provided us with incentive to do better, and to make the process itself more transparent ... for the most part, it's an industry of players who are compliant, and desire to be compliant."

Talcott Franklin, a litigator in the Dallas office of Washington's Patton Boggs who represents both plaintiffs and defendants in mortgage-related lawsuits, said the litigation was inevitable.

"It doesn't surprise me at all. I've been predicting this since 2006," said Franklin, who wrote about fallout from the housing crisis in a book proposal a few years ago. "We said, 'Look, this whole [housing market] is going to collapse and litigation is going to go wacky as a result of it."

Franklin said that securitization -- the packaging of mortgages in bundles and selling the package to investors -- is a key factor driving the mortgage industry litigation. He said that rating agencies rated securitization packages under the assumption that home prices would always increase -- which didn't happen -- so if a borrower defaulted, they would foreclose the property, repossess and sell it for more than the amount of the mortgage.

"Much of that assumption proved to be false, obviously, " Franklin said. "What you have instead is a bunch of losses. And once you have losses, you have litigation."