I feel your post requires some clarifications itself.

I wish you had addressed your misgivings to me personally.

I'm unsure what part regarding this topic should have been addressed to you first. Someone's concern was information from A going to B. My experience was information from B going to A. I believe it's relevant. Our companies no longer do business due to our experience. So again, not sure to where the obligation to reach out to you is. And I'm not sure what the point of it would have been, because...

...we have collected email addresses from years in business from many sources.

So, how many "years in business" has AbstractorPro been collecting emails? Again, my point was that my company's order intake address and my personal address aren't available online. Our company contact address is. So, if all three addresses ended up on AbstractorPro's mailing list, how did the first two get there without obtaining them from Real Title? And how is that not relevant to a concern about AbstractorPro info going to Real Title?

But, the main thing I wanted to clear up, since even you said you have a "vague memory" of it regards our communication issues. I feel your depiction of our companies' reasoning for no longer doing business insinuated that I do not feel communication is important.

"But as I recall you did not want us to email you so often requesting confirmation of orders. And we had to part ways because I could not promise that we would not email you so much as it is pretty firm policy at RTS to get an acknowledgement and eta from any searcher for every work order we send them. This is generally industry standard, and we really must get confirmation stating the order was received with an eta. You didn’t want to do this, so we stopped working together, but we feel no need to malign you because of this, or impugn your reputation, or suggest disreputable things about you because we had different needs and wants, and we would respectfully request the same of you."

Personally, I consider your recollection of this to be slightly maligning, impugning, and suggesting disreputable things about how our businesses worked together. I also don't feel it's very close to accurate.

We worked together for about 16 months. During that time, our policies never changed. We don't do confirmations and the package we send has our ETAs. Your company wanted 8 hour turnarounds and a confirmation with each order. Our turnarounds are based on days, not hours. I told your company the same thing I tell every one that asks us for either of those, "I understand that's what you need, so we probably aren't going to be a good fit for you." And so some people don't use us. I don't know what the others do, but I don't complain about their automated emails because if they're going to use us and not expect us to change our process, then I don't expect them to rewrite their computer system.

Regardless of your "pretty firm policy," your company sent us work anyways. When we didn't reply to the emails, you started calling. And not in a, "Hey, this is a rush and our client's bugging us" way, which I completely understand, but rather on practically every order. That was the first time I talked to someone and said, (paraphrasing) "This is what we do. This is what we said we were going to do. If the calls continue, we'll have to stop accepting orders." And the calls stopped for a while. At some point... I don't have the exact dates, but it was many months later... they started back up. I talked to someone new that time and they stopped again. I assumed it was the change in personnel that was the cause. Cool... we're all back on the same page.

January 2019, I get a call and, I don't remember the exact details... a large project; new client... you would know better than me... but someone discusses with me a large dump of orders to come in. I say that I prefer to have only one of my people work on everything as opposed to sending a couple of people to a county, so we agree these might go into 2-3 days instead of 1. The next day, we start getting calls again.

Now, here's where things fell apart on my end. While I thought the status email issue had been taken care of, I come to learn that the main person watching our general contact address had started filtering your emails. They said they were sick of dealing with them. In theory, it should have only affected these status requests, but you started sending some of these project orders to our general contact address. I already had a 'no filtering' rule anyway, but as I said at the time, it sucked to have to let someone go while completely understanding why they did what they did. So, it was at this point that I emailed Sean, who I was told should be the one to handle any issues, telling him we would eat the cost of these missing searches, but would then accept no more. (That's in an email sent 1/22/2019.) Needless to say, we continue getting new orders. I'm sure I didn't reply to all of them, but I know I replied to the first couple stating, again, we were accepting no new orders from you.

Then I'm told I should speak to you. When we talked, you told me that you were going through a period of growth and sometimes word didn't get down to those making calls and sending emails because you couldn't get everyone in the same room. I don't feel that really explained the 16 month issue we had, but whatever. We also discussed getting a list of everything you had outstanding from that big batch of orders. I was pretty sure we had caught everything that had been filtered and had been told by Sean that he believed one we were discussing in an email was the last one. The list you sent me had an additional 8 orders on it. I've verified twice since then and those were never sent to us. Also after our discussion, the status check emails started back up again... on orders you had assigned to us after I said we were accepting no more. That was when I cut things off again.

A couple of things I think should be added, too, regarding the status checks. I did a quick search for your orders in our system (662 of them). 178 of those orders were out of our system the same day. That's 26%. Granted, some of those might have been where we input a question that no one in the office could immediately answer, but even removing stuff like that, that's a large percentage for same-day turnaround. Also, regarding communication in general, I have examples of still receiving emails regarding orders we had contacted your office about; receiving status checks on federal holidays; an email refuting copy charges noted the same way we had noted them from the beginning because you were unclear what they were for, and quite a few that just made it seem like emails were being sent out blindly. I don't want a vague memory to insinuate that the turnarounds were an issue and the cause of the status checks.

Our companies agreed on a figurative 'terms of service' and repeatedly one side was ignored. I think it is absolutely relevant to the argument that one might not have complete faith in the software's terms of service. Please feel free to explain to me where I'm wrong.

I felt I was being somewhat vague regarding these issues in my initial response to this thread. And again, I'm not sure what part warranted personal contact between us beforehand, but I don't feel that same philosophy was followed in your recollection of why our businesses aren't working together. Personally, I read your recollection as us not wanting to communicate and your email practices were a reasonable industry standard that we were ignoring. If there's anything you feel isn't accurate, please don't hesitate to let me know. But, I'll be happy to point you to the dates and times of the emails that verify everything I've written. I'd imagine the board admins don't care for this discussion to continue here, which I understand, but as I said before, I don't feel that response was even close to accurate and needed to be addressed. I'm an abstractor like everyone else. It's hard to turn down work and I think I was pretty tolerant for a pretty long time. I know I'm not always right, but I'm open to any questions anyone would have regarding this because I don't think I was unreasonable during any of it. Going back, re-reading and remembering this fiasco certainly raised my blood pressure enough to prevent me from replying a couple of times earlier. So, it's not like I'll be checking in here regularly, but if you feel there's anything else that should be addressed privately, we know you have email.

Andrew J. Trenary, Sr.