Running the Names
January 25, 2018
Morning all, as I stated yesterday my training moved at a much slower pace than we move today, the first abstracting duty that I was entrusted with was running liens and judgments for the boss. She would search the title while I shadowed her then I would be responsible for running then liens and judgments. I can distinctly remember chanting “I hope, I don’t find anything, I hope I don’t find anything”, now it is because its extra work, back then it was because I didn’t know what the heck I was looking at. As I stated before, there were no computers if you found a judgment you had to pull the suit record and sift thru all the correspondence to find the final judgement and make a copy of that.
Searching names is much easier these days, key in the name press enter out comes a list of entries that you sift thru. I was taught to start the search process with the first three letters of the last name and the first letter of the given name. This can produce a list with many, many entries you sift thru that list just for misspellings and typos, then you add additional information to your search criteria to lessen the results. We have to remembers those are humans entering that data, they make mistakes too .
Searching name variations is a touchy subject, or at least it was in my early days, there would be actual arguments among the abstractors over what name variations should be run. I can remember one particular “discussion” that lead to yelling and files being tossed to the ground followed by a week-long silent treatment, which turned out to not be such a bad thing. I actually know a guy who keeps a list, if he find one person with some odd name variation he forever runs that name variation. An example of this might be a John Smith that was indexed as Pookie Smith so now when running the first name of John he also runs Pookie, just ridiculous. Our policy here at Punctual is to run obvious variations of both the family and given name; some examples would be Grey /Gray, Thibodeaux/Thibodaux, Green/Greene and William/Bill, John/ Johnnie/Jon, Steven/Stephen you get the drift. The key is to keep your eyes open for things that seem out of place, you cannot abstract with blinders, question everything, don’t let anyone try to sneak something past you.