The following is based on Connecticut law. You would need to review the law of your state to determine if the same holds true there. You need to look at the big picture in order to answer your question. Your contract is with the title company that has hired you. It is under contract to another party most often a lender. The party injured by his conduct would be his client. In which case his client could make a claim against his insurance for damages arising from his negligence. In most cases his breach of a contract with you would not be covered by the bond or the e&o insurance.

Under certain circumstances you might be able to file a contract claim against his client, but you would have to establish that you were a third party beneficiary to that contract. In order to do that you would need to show that you were an intended beneficiary and not just an incidental beneficiary. I have litigated third party beneficiary claims in Connecticut. Generally the court looks to see if you are expressly named in the contract between your client and his client as a party within the intended stream of payment. If so, it is a relatively light burden of proof to establish that you have a claim as an intended beneficiary.

If you are found by the court to be an incidental benefiary, you will never make it to trial because you will be defeated in a pretrial motion for summary judgment. The further you are removed from the contract between the title company and his client the less likely you are to succeed in establishing yourself as an intended beneficiary. For example, your client may be required to provide title insurance for the lender. Very often the title insurers insist on having the title search performed by one of their own approved abstractors. In which case you would be one step further removed from the contractual relationship between your client and his client because your contract is now with the title insurer. The title insurer is under contract to the title company and the title company is under contract to the lender.

I can empathize with your loss on the Bridgespan disaster. I lost $800 on that one...the only time I was never paid. There is not too much you can do in a bankruptcy except file a proof of claim and settle for pennies on the dollar. If you are dealing with a client of questionable credit, you might seek to have yourself named as the title searcher on the HUD1 form. In which case the disbursement agent pays you rather than your client. The disbursement agent ditributes the checks at the closing table on the date of the closing in a sale or upon the expiration of the borrower's three day right to cancel in a refi. However, your client may not agree to this because it is all too easy for him to find another abstractor that will perform the search on his terms. As we know the abstractors as a group have no bargaining power.