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Computer Glitch Stalls Orleans Parish Civil Case Listings

December 01, 2010 posted by Steve Brownstein

The pace of real estate transactions in Orleans Parish (New Orleans) has slowed to a crawl because of a computer glitch in the Civil District Court clerk's office.

The problem, which has been traced to a failure in the hard drive, has kept researchers from the online data they need to complete a 30-year check on residential and commercial property to make sure that every piece of land for sale isn't burdened by such obstacles as liens, judgments and lawsuits, Clerk Dale Atkins said.

"It's a killer," said Sharall Grissen, chief operating officer of Stewart Title of Louisiana. "The real estate business is already tough. This is incredible."

The problem was detected Oct. 26, Atkins said, and a series of information-technology experts have been at work since then to recover the data.

"The original real estate records HAVE NOT BEEN LOST," Atkins said in a written statement.

As of now,  online records were available through Aug. 26, 2008, she said, and data through all of 2009 could be available soon.

Despite the panic that a computer malfunction can cause, property searches and title searches can still be performed by poring over heavy books, Civil District Judge Rosemary Ledet said. "It's inconvenient to do it through a manual system, but before the indexing system was computerized, that was how property searches were done."

But what makes this job especially onerous, title attorney Andrew Treuting said, is that when the computer malfunctioned, the indexing was lost.

Consequently, for information about the period that hadn't been recovered, "we have no idea how to find it," he said.

"We're holding up tons of closings -- 30, 40," said Joyce DuSaules, Stewart Title of Louisiana's manager. "It's kind of like when Katrina hit. We couldn't do anything. We had to wait."

Because of the havoc that the storm caused, Atkins' office had hoped to prevent future snafus by hiring a company called i365 to back up the data regularly. But, Atkins said, all that information wasn't being backed up.

When the problem was first detected, "we were told it was a system failure, and they could get us up and running," Atkins said. "I don't think the court was made aware of the severity of the problem until recently."

In a statement cited on a New orleans television station,  FOX8, an i365 spokeswoman called the situation "unfortunate" but said the company will try to make things better.

"We're hoping to resolve amicably with them," Atkins said, "but we can't rule out litigation."

After a Houston firm said that it couldn't help, two hard drives, including one from the court's information-technology office, were sent to Data Recovery Technologies in Duluth, Ga. The company confirmed  that it can get data from that hard drive through last year, Atkins said.

That "is our hope," Ledet said. "My office is making arrangements to put in the information through 2010 if we have to, but the company hasn't told us that it will not be able to do it."

But even if all the computer files are restored, researchers will still have to lug heavy, dusty books around because the records weren't computerized until the late 1980s.

Civil Court records, which would contain lawsuits, went online in 1985, Atkins said, followed four years later by mortgage and conveyance files, which could contain information about liens, court judgments and mortgage problems.

 

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