Dear Wayne -

Several of my counties have gone online and since they have gone online the county clerks have made SPECIFIC DISCLAIMERS on the sites that it is for information only and official records can be found at the courthouse.  One of my counties even though on a county site is not being done by the clerk's office but by the appraisal district - get that - deeds of trusts are listed as a completely different document.  The real problem revolves around in nationwide companies putting people on computers thinking they can train them in no time at all and they will know how to research even though as we know every county has a different way of indexing, etc.  Can you imagine what it would be like to do your job for all the counties in the United States and do it properly - legal documents are not even called the same name.  In my particular state, indexing is done by name and by property - by name is available online - property is not.  In my state many of the counties do not index assignments by name - only by property.  And in some counties some are listed by name just the last couple of years not all the years.  But even at that we have to search by property too because as we all know there are errors in assignments that don't list the mortgagors' name just the mortgage and legal description - and therefore you would never pick this up if you didn't also search by property.  I don't know if this is everywhere but that is the problem - the nationwide companies are assuming that it is the same everywhere.  All I have to say is that in two of my counties local attorneys hired me to find out if there was a sale after their abstract of judgment was on file.  In both cases, this turned out to be true.  2 title companies are being sued.  I do not know who they had do searches for them but I wonder if they tried to do it online or they went after the cheapest out there.  I have talked to companies and they say they go after the cheapest and no they don't check people out.  They said well we see what they send back and if it is okay we use them.  I said how do you know if it is okay - I mean who in the heck knows if a title search should come back with a judgment or not?  It's just a mess as far as I am concerned and I'm starting to get real irritated to have to go to a county with one order because they can't do it and the county is online.  We all thought at first that it was just the market - I don't believe its the market - I believe it will stay the same no matter what the market is because of this until everyone figures out it is more expensive to file the same assignment 3x that was already there.  Our fees are lower than the filing fee alone to file them - are we crazy or what?

Lisa