In Connecticut we are not permitted to disclaim liability for negligence through a writing. We are permitted to limit our liability to a reasonable dollar amount through a written agreement. When I draft contracts for clients, I routinely put a clause into the contract limiting liability. I have a client that rents out "Moonwalks" for kids parties. If you are not familiar with the term, these are the big inflatable enclosures that kids climb into and jump up and down. In order to get liability insurance, their insurance carrier expressly requested a clause in the contract limiting liability since waivers don't seem to hold up in the Superior Court.

In so far as placing the language of limitation in the abstract itself after concluding a contract, I am not sure that it would work in all states. I would think that it would be better to put the clause in the contract rather than the abstract. It would then become an enforceable term of the contract.  Placing the language in the abstract alone, could be construed as a unilatteral attempt to amend or modify the prior contract or possibly a counter offer. Whether it would be enforceable would depend on the facts of each case and the law of the state which governed the contract. There is no universal answer. I have run into instances in which a client questioned the absence of an encumbrance on an abstract which resulted from a mistake in the land records. Once a copy of the index page showing the omission  was produced, the client was satisfied.

I do not use a disclaimer in my abstracts. In so far as the common law of negligence is concerned in Connecticut there are four elements to a negligence claim: 1. there is a duty to exercise reasonable care in performing a search, 2. there was a breach of this standard of care, 3. there were damages, 4. the damages were proximately cause by the breach of the standard of care that was owed. It would seem that the duty owed would be to accurately report the information contained in the public records. If the information is incorrectly contained in the Town Clerk's records, it would seem that the abstractor has correctly reported the information in the land records, and it could be argued that there was no breach of the standard of care owed to the client. It could be further argued that the damages to the client were not proximately caused by the contents of the title abstract, but rather by the contents of the land records. That would be the abstractor's defense, and he would still have to go through the tribulations of a trial. If he were sued, he would file a third party claim or a cross claim against both the Town and the Town Clerk. The sovereign immunity doctrine that protects state employees does not extend to political subdivisions of Connecticut

In Connecticut corrections of errors in the index are usually dated by the Town Clerk. However, if an error is brought to the abstractor's attention, it is a good idea for him to get a copy of the page without the correction before he brings the mistake to the Town Clerk's attention. He should also get a copy of the index page after the correction is made. He then has proof that the error was in the index rather than in his abstract. I had a conversation with one of the Town Clerks several months ago in which she admitted that they are very sensitive to corrections in the index because both the Town Clerk and the Town are liable.