To answer on Loretta's behalf - judgments aren't reliably recorded in the Land Records in Maryland, you have to either run to all the courhouses, including Federal, and do them there, some counties have a separate computer you search, and there is a company that sends little people with laptops to get the information and dump it into their database for which they charge you a pretty modest fee per name and you usually get the results back the same day.  Maryland is not, shall we say, abstractor-friendly.  Particularly recording documents - they check for errors and reject it on the first error, and don't check for any other mistakes, so you end up going 3-4 times on one set of documents.  Not fun, you'd think settlement companies would learn the peculiarities before they sent the docs, wouldn't you!  Ha!