Enabling Paperless Title Insurance

When it comes to residential, commercial and industrial title insurance, Cortes & Hay offers the necessary combination of experience and expertise across the entire range of professional services. Since 1971, their business has been defined by customer-centered relationships that are as personal as they are professional.

To properly serve their customers, Cortes & Hay must create files of documents that need to be distributed to appropriate parties. The documents that comprise a title insurance binder come from two places. There are documents generated internally, and documents that come from external sources.

For 30 years, Cortes & Hay stored files in filing cabinets in the 1,500 sq. ft. basement of their original office. As their business grew, so did their mountain of paper. The basement was transformed into rows and rows of filing cabinets. When there was no more space, they rented additional storage space offsite under a bank building. Their backfile grew until it totaled hundreds of thousands of files. During that period, they not only needed to keep those files, they needed to have access to the information contained in them.

"Keeping all that paper can be critical for many reasons," says Michele Newhouse, Vice President Operations of Cortes & Hay, "We have to keep everything for seven years, but it can be a great benefit to keep everything forever. We often have to search back through 60 years of clear title. If we save the back titles, we can search in a couple of hours what might have taken two weeks. We've accumulated a lot of back titles. Whenever we do a search, there is no point in throwing out what we learn."

Along with Newhouse, company President David Hay wanted a more efficient alternative to the growing mountain of paper. The two envisioned a paperless office. Together, they began researching electronic alternatives to paper in January 2001 with an eye towards a completely electronic archive. Hay and Newhouse went to technology shows and called other title agencies to learn anything that would offer a solution. It wasn't easy.