Hello, friends! Ben with Veracity here, looking for some feedback.
When I was trained as an abstractor (in the Detroit area, roughly 450 years ago) I was taught to follow a simple rule:
"If you cite a document on your summary, you should include a copy in your bundle. If you include a document in your bundle, it should be cited on your summary."
That was a good rule at the time, and I believe it has only become more important. We just had an example of why this is important: the abstractor provided copies of the deeds in the chain of title, but did not list them on her summary report. In fact, when asked, she refused to. Later, we learned that the abstract was missing an outsale deed which was necessary to understand the complicated metes and bounds legal description. The customer, naturally, was very upset that they had wasted hours trying to make sense of the title without that deed. What happened? Simple: the abstractor's scanner had "skipped" that deed.
If the abstractor had included a written chain of title, even just a list of deeds, this would have been a minor problem. My team would have noticed the omission before sending the abstract to the client. But instead, this correction required hours of work on the client's part.
My question is: do you make sure your summary agrees with your documents, and vice versa? If not, why not?
Thank you for your time.
to post a reply:
login - or -
register