Managing Title Review for a Major Canadian Real Estate Law Firm

Introduction :

Managing title review for a major real estate law firm – when real estate professionals need help organizing, reviewing and abstracting large volumes of real estate documentation, they turn to Cenza as a highly trusted outsourcing partner with the requisite expertise.

The Assignment:

Our client is a leading Canadian law firm with a national network that specializes in handling a high volume of residential real estate transactional matters. The firm was in the process of building a database for the storage and retrieval of more than 27,000 title documents relating to all its clients. The project specifications required that the title documents all be reviewed, analyzed and summarized in order to capture detailed information about the rights, obligations and restrictions pertaining to the non-financial land title charges for each client property. The project goal was to provide staff with ready access to a short synopsis for each land title record.

The Challenge:

The large volume of land title documents that needed to be reviewed and summarized posed a threshold problem. The client’s legal staff couldn’t be diverted from more important revenue generating tasks. This was a compelling case for pursuing an outsourced solution but only if the review teams possessed the requisite expertise to ensure the document summaries would be sufficiently accurate.

The Solution:

Cenza’s real estate document review teams are staffed 100% by qualified attorneys with extensive real estate and contract management experience, including team leaders and senior review staff with a minimum of 5 years and 2 years experience, respectively, That’s the fundamental reason the client chose to work with us and that’s why Cenza has become a leader in providing document review services to the real estate industry in the US, Canada and the UK real estate domain expertise combined with excellent communication skills.

In this case, given the high volume of documents, we assembled a review team of 10 Real Estate lawyers and established a security framework that enabled our team, working in a dedicated and locked down area of our facility, to operate inside the client’s firewall in order to maintain the highest level of data security.
Through close collaboration with the client, we designed a customized workflow to support a highly efficient, cost effective and high quality process for document review and summary, which provided for three tiers of quality control. Our legal team performed the initial review and summary utilizing templates that we created to ensure consistent summarization. After that our Quality Review team reviewed the document abstracts to ensure they were prepared consistently and in accordance with project requirements. The project manager was then responsible for a final audit of all the title charges. Throughout the review process, any issues or questions in the title documents regarding missing pages, illegible titles and title effective dates, were promptly escalated to the client’s in-house team.

Even with the three layers of review, we were able to meet the client’s deadline by completing the summary of 27,092 title charges in the less than 5500 hours from the kickoff of the project. Client renewed the project as part of the extension and it is now an ongoing project.

The Impact:

Outsourcing provides a powerful solution for the management and review of real estate legal documentation in high volume. In this case Cenza was able to keep the client on track and under budget in establishing and maintain on ongoing basis their internal title charge database.

• By outsourcing the client realized an estimated savings of 35-40% in the project cost.
• The client’s legal team was freed up to focus on revenue generating tasks.
• Our solution resulted in the client obtaining a streamlined document management system, including sequential filing, a file naming convention and source information, all provided

If you’re confronting a similar challenge, with a large volume of real estate documentation needing review, whether as part of due diligence for an M&A transaction or an internal audit process, contact Cenza to find out how we can tailor a similar solution for you.