Electronic Recording and the Rundown

As we ease our way into electronic recording, I expect that the earliest documents submitted will not be particularly time sensitive. These will be documents that would otherwise by sent to us by mail and we assume if you are relying on the U.S. Postal Service (as good as it is) to get us the documents, you’re not especially concerned with the half dozen documents that are recorded immediately before yours. Time sensitive documents such as deeds and mortgages are a different story. When a customer brings one of those to the recording counter, he has (usually) just used one of our public access terminals to do a rundown that includes every document recorded up to that moment. To bridge the gap between the end of that rundown and the actual recording – only a few minutes given the low volume of recordings these days – we have an automatic look back feature on our recording terminals. When we enter a name in the grantor index for an about to be recorded document, if that same name has been entered into the computer during the preceding 45 minutes, a pop-up warning box appears stating that the same name appeared in an earlier document, giving the book and page number of that document. The recording clerk then tells the customer about the warning and the customer either tells us to proceed (presumably he already knows about that document) or pulls back from the recording counter to check it out. Since our website is instantly updated with new recordings, the remote customer can do a final search over the Internet just before pressing the “Send to Recorder” button on the electronic recording screen. That mimics the at-the-registry rundown before getting in line at the recording counter. And the cashiering terminals still have the 45-minute look back feature, regardless of whether the name has been typed by a registry clerk or submitted electronically. But the parallels end there. What if we have a name match with an electronically submitted document? The customer is no longer three feet away on the other side of the recording counter. The customer is now miles away on the other side of cyber space. Do we automatically reject the entire submission? Do we record it anyway? Neither of those seem like good solutions to this problem. We have some ideas, but if any of you have suggestions, we would really appreciate hearing them.