My thoughts are this:

There is a distinct difference between abstractor error and public record error.  You cannot be held liable for a public record error if you can prove that it was not your error.  In some states, I think the public official can be held liable if his/her records are not accurate.  More and more today, agents and underwriters are turning claims in against searchers for abstractor error.  I believe this is one of the reasons that E&O rates have gone up so much in the past few years.  I believe there was a recent article on SOT about a case in NY where the searcher or search company was held liable in a lawsuit for a missed judgment or mortgage.  There are way too many abstractors that don't have E&O insurance, and many that have general professional liability insurance which they think is E&O insurance.  There is a great deal of mis-information and consumer ignorance in this area in the abstracting community.  What many abstractors don't realize is that their clients could come after their personal assets to collect on a claim that was a result of abstractor error, or presumed abstractor error in the case of lack of evidence to prove otherwise. 

It is somewhat interesting that we live in a county where you are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty.  In our business anyway, our clients usually assume that we made the mistake.  Since there is no track record of who edited the index in most counties, often times the error is blamed on the abstractor even though the evidence is circumstantial.  Errors are usually discovered years after a search is completed.  There is no way, in most systems to tell what the record was at a point in the past, only what it is today.  In "good old days" of thumb indexing and index books, corrections were obvious because often they were hand written in and the date of the correction was noted in the margin.

Abstractors don't collect any premium yet we seem to be held liable for a disproportionate amount of liability based upon our role (and fees) in the transaction.  I don't understand why a court of law that would place so much liability on an abstractor doesn't see the assumption of that liability as the unlicensed practice of insurance.  Today, it clearly benefits a title agency or company to oursourse their search work, as opposed to having staff searchers.  With staff searchers the liability is all theirs, with outsourcing to abstractors, it seems they've also outsourced the majority of the liability (at least with regard to the title side of the transaction).

Thoughts anyone?