Quality Control and Quill Pens

Sometimes it seems that quality control at law offices is going the way of the quill pen. I’m not talking about the content of the documents as much as I am the organization of the documents. Time and again, customers will present themselves at our recording counter and thrust a stack of pages at us with the expectation that we will sort out what pages go with what document, the order in which the documents should be recorded, and even whether the document is recorded land or registered land. Worst of all is the attitude displayed when we ask these customers to put the papers in the proper order and groupings. Surly describes the response of many. While we certainly try to be as helpful as possible, it is not the registry’s responsibility to ensure that registered land goes to the land court section, that the homestead that is stapled to the back of the mortgage be dislodged and recorded separately or that the first mortgage be recorded first and the second mortgage second. We have tried to address this by instituting a rule that all documents should be fastened with either staples or paperclips prior to approaching the recording counter, but all this has done is caused some of these customers to staple entire packages of documents – an MLC, a deed, a mortgage and a homestead – together into a single group. I’m not quite sure how to handle this and would welcome any suggestions. Maybe we will require all multi-page documents to be stapled before reaching the recording counter. Requiring a cover sheet that lists the documents and their order, similar to that in use at the Middlesex South satellite office, might be another option. As always, when you discuss something like this, there’s a risk that the many people that do it right will somehow be hit with the broad brush of criticism. That’s certainly not my intent. We have many customers who are role models of professionalism. But the number who don’t know what they are doing and who are unwilling to acknowledge that they don’t know what they’re doing is rising at a frightening rate.