Here is a real life...

I got a call from an attorney recently who wanted to know about our standards of practice in a certain county and how we handle bringdowns prior to recording documents.

Nothing out of the oridinary for us or anyone else.  But this is what the problem is.

Insurance Company is suing Settlement Company for a missed IRS lien that recorded on the Friday before the documents recorded on Monday.  The Settlement Company had contracted out to Abstractor Company to do the recording (maybe the search as well - not sure).  The Settlement Company couriered over the deed to the courthouse attention to the Abstractor Company to the courthouse's record room.  Package was signed by another Abstractor (actually a guy who had a business of only recording documents in that county).  From what I can gather (& have heard from a couple of people) Abstractor Company has no record of recording the document themselves or ever being in receipt of the documents.  The Settlement Company had a practice of looking up recorded documents themselves if they didn't get a call from the Abstractor by the time they thought they should have - so they probably checked the index on Monday and found the document of record and never called the Abstractor Company to check the status of their recording.  Now, I guess it depends on what happens in the case against the Settlement Company whether or no the Abstract Company will be brought in or not.  The now current owners are in foreclosure and this IRS lien is in Sr position, thus creating a bad situation for the lender.

Very scary!!!  We really try to get clients to only send documents directly to us and never to the courthouse.  The major reasons are 1) Lost documents 2) Someone else recording your documents inadvertantly (you hope not on purpose).

We want even talk about the fact that we can't 'look' at documents that aren't merged into the index but recorded after the published effective date.  The above situation is still problematic as the effective date for that county is always at least a week behind and if the IRS lien was initially index correctly it wouldn't be caught until the county 'verified' that instrument's index entry.  I happen to know it was initially indexed correctly so a B/D would have found it but b/c apparently one wasn't done..... Well we'll see what happens on this one.

An finally a real title question!!!!!!!!