On Sep 25, 2009, at 4:28 AM, [log in to unmask] wrote:

> The first question I think anyone here would have for you is, what  
> does your company do and why does it have title and escrow records?


Sorry, I forget that there are many sides to these things. We are a  
title insurance company (among other things). So we sell title  
policies for all types of transactions -- individual homeowners to  
large commercial purchases. The claims are for claims against the  
policies that we have written. My understanding (and I'm definitely  
still learning what in the world we do), is that the policy is just  
for a particular real estate transaction for a particular property.  
The next time the property is sold, a new policy would be written.

On Sep 25, 2009, at 5:07 AM, Patrick Cunningham wrote:

> The other type is unique (to me) to California and that is where an  
> independent third party handles the funds involved in a real estate  
> transaction.

For escrow, we are the third party that handles the transfer of funds  
between purchaser and seller, again from small to very large  
transactions.

The records I'm looking at right now for the move are all California  
based records.

As it happens, after I posted the question, I picked up my July/Aug  
IMJ (I'm just now getting around to reading that one) and there was a  
news piece saying that the DoJ has asked Congress to require the  
mortgage industry to retain borrower records for up to 10 years. In  
order to investigate lender fraud, they want settlement and other loan  
records. So for a quick and dirty cutoff point, I've chosen 10 years.  
If Congress doesn't pass such a law, I can always adjust it down when  
I do the retention schedule.

Today I talked to another interesting operation -- reinsurance. This  
is a group that has agreements with other insurance companies to  
spread the risk of insuring properties. This insurance, rather than  
protecting the person who owns the property, lasts for the life of the  
structure. Because we have no way of knowing when or if the structure  
is demolished, these records are, in effect, permanent. (At least that  
the way I think I understood it.) I ran across a similar situation  
with the secondary lending market. The company would write loans, then  
sell them to someone else to service. The way the sales agreements  
were written, they needed to maintain the original loan documents for  
the life of the loan. However, once the loan was sold, they had no way  
of knowing when the loan was actually paid off. At the time, many  
loans were refinanced long before the original loan term was up.  I  
scheduled those for the longest term it could be -- 30 or sometimes 40  
years.

How have others dealt with record series where the event date was  
unknowable? Are these records permanent by default? That seems almost  
to be a "just in case" retention period. I would think a risk analysis  
could be done, i.e., what are the chances that a claim/lawsuit/need  
for the records would actually come after 10 years, after 20 years,  
etc vs the cost to keep the records forever -- both physical or  
electronic storage costs, and potential discovery costs or any other  
costs that arise from just keeping the stuff around, and then just  
CHOOSE something reasonable and legally defensible -- or not and just  
decide that you'll pay the costs IF it ever comes up.

Since I'm rambling.... As I'm plodding along in this new job and  
learning about different aspects of the company, I realized that  
unlike other employees who may know only about the portion of the the  
business that they are directly involved in -- records managers have  
to learn enough about every aspect of whatever business our companies  
are in to be able to do OUR jobs well. Personally, I love it. I can't  
imaging working at a job where I may know Joan over in such-and-such  
department, but have absolutely no idea what they did. When done well,  
records managers can be perhaps the one person, aside from the company  
president, that everyone knows. Whether they LIKE us or not is  
entirely another thing.


Nolene Sherman
[log in to unmask]

Tracking where records are kept is what Tiggers and Records Managers  
do best!

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