Hi Judy,

We keep ours forever also.  I wish we had started scanning and indexing earlier than we did (1999), but we still have all of the earlier stuff.  It may be more difficult to find, but we have them.  I have had clients call with questions on exams that we did 8 years ago.  It was nice to be able to pull it and look at the abstractors notes.

A "potential claim" can arise many years after the search is done.  By having your original search and notes, you will be able to better defend yourself from it.  We were able to fax our original search to the client and show them that we DID show the "title defect" on our search and never heard back from them.

Robert A. Franco
SOURCE OF TITLE