I’m the Register and Recorder for Lawrence County, Pennsylvania. I’ve worked in the office for thirty one years. Lawrence County is a fifth class county, population of 86,000 around about. We have a lot of rural areas, but our county seat is the city of Newcastle.
I actually started in 1994 as a microfilm clerk. We were so busy with making copies for people all day. And these big books that you see behind me, we would lift them and make copies for realtors and surveyors. We would have these long lists, and so much time was spent doing that.
And now they have access to that at the click of a button. I feel like when I started, there wasn’t even a website, let alone all the records to be online. The changes I’ve seen are pretty drastic and pretty amazing. We record between eight and nine thousand a year and I bet seventy percent are through eRecording.
At one point, we had a lot of customers that were title searchers.
So this room was very busy. We had a lot of customers coming to the counter but then all of a sudden we started doing eRecordings so the customers would come in, the attorneys, different law offices from outside of Lawrence County, any of the banks, they’re using eRecording far more than they are coming in, which has done great for our office. We’re not feeling as overwhelmed with the incoming customers because we’re dealing with the eRecordings.
I can remember the back and forth if you got a deed in a mortgage from a closing and there was something wrong, you had to reject it and mail it back. And now when you’re eRecording, you just send it right back tell them what the issue is, it takes five minutes we have the document back and that is very important I mean sometimes people are waiting for their documents to be recorded before they can start construction or moving into a home. It’s pretty amazing how everything’s evolved.
