Title Examiners Spend Half Their Day on Clerical Retrieval Work

Title examiners – professionals trained to make legal judgments about property ownership – routinely spend close to half their workday retrieving and organizing documents, according to Jimmy Lewis, CEO and Co-Founder of TrueFocus Automation. The examination itself, the work that justifies their expertise, gets whatever time remains.

Jimmy argues that this pattern is not an anomaly at a few understaffed shops. It is how the industry has structured its workflows for decades, and it produces a measurable drag on throughput, cost, and job satisfaction for the people doing the work.

How the Examiners Day Actually Breaks Down

The title search process involves several distinct phases: retrieving documents from county sites and aggregator platforms, organizing those documents into pertinent and non-pertinent categories, running searches through systems like PACER and OLFAX, assembling the full package, and then conducting the actual examination. That last step is where an examiners training and judgment matter. Everything before it is largely mechanical.

According to Jimmy, the mechanical portion dominates most examiners days. Maybe half of the examiner or searchers day is spent just kind of retrieving documents and putting all that together instead of doing the examination where their brain should mostly be used, he says.

In a standard eight-hour workday, a title examiner may spend three to four hours on tasks that are repetitive, process-driven, and interchangeable with administrative work. The examination itself gets compressed into whatever time remains.

A Workflow Design Problem, Not a Staffing Problem

Jimmy frames this as a structural issue rather than a technology gap or talent shortage. Title companies built their processes around what was historically possible – manual retrieval, manual organization, manual data entry – and have not systematically questioned whether that structure still makes sense.

The work thats typically more manual and repetitive and monotonous, tedious – thats stuff that the bot should be assigned to do, and the human still keeps the decision making on their end, Jimmy says.

When examiners are bottlenecked by retrieval work, companies either limit their file volume or hire additional staff to compensate. Some have turned to offshore vendors to handle the lower-skill portions of the workflow, though Jimmy notes that this introduces complications around consistency and quality control. Neither response addresses the underlying design flaw: that the workflow was never structured to separate mechanical work from judgment work.

What Examiners Could Be Doing Instead

When retrieval and organization work is removed from an examiners day, Jimmy says the same professional can handle significantly more files without sacrificing quality. Instead of maybe doing a few files a day, they can double or triple that, he says.

Beyond throughput, complex cases – those involving probate documents, divorce decrees, or title issues requiring deeper research – demand focused attention that is difficult to sustain when the day is fragmented by retrieval tasks. When examiners are freed from mechanical work, Jimmy says they can spend more time on quality control and on cases that genuinely require their expertise.

The examiner is doing the in-between work that they should still be doing with their title knowledge and background, Jimmy says, describing the post-automation workflow. The examination itself remains human. What changes is how much of the day is available for it.

How TrueFocus Automation Separates Retrieval from Examination

TrueFocus Automations Title Hunter platform automates document retrieval and organization so that examiners receive a near-complete package before they begin their review. The system goes out to county sites and aggregator platforms, retrieves documents, categorizes them as pertinent or non-pertinent, runs the relevant database searches, and assembles a package ready for examination.

The examiner still handles name variations, documents that arent available online, and all final decisions about what a file requires. Were pretty much just taking the heavy lifting off of the plate, Jimmy says.

Jimmy notes that the output is not a fully complete package in every case – some files still require the examiner to track down documents that automation cannot locate. But the goal is to get as close to complete as possible before the examiner touches the file, so their time is spent on decisions rather than retrieval.

Addressing the Replacement Concern

Jimmy says TrueFocus frames the technology as a digital assistant rather than a replacement. Youre hiring an administrative assistant, just a digital bot assistant or an extra pair of hands, he says. The goal is to make the examiner more efficient by taking away the monotonous work they likely dislike, while preserving their role as the decision-maker in every file.

For title companies evaluating their own workflows, the core question is practical: if close to half of an examiners day goes to work that doesnt require examination expertise, what would throughput and quality look like if that work were handled by automation instead?

Disclosure: Individuals or companies mentioned may have a commercial relationship with KeyCrew.

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