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The gap in the chain of title

A title opinion is a chain of documents with no missing links. Finding the missing link is a reading exercise, and the documents are long, repetitive and in several languages.

The situation

A title search produces a stack: sale deeds going back decades, a partition deed, a gift deed, mutation entries, an encumbrance certificate, a development agreement, a release that may or may not have been registered.

The opinion turns on whether every transfer in that chain is accounted for, whether each transferor had the right to transfer, whether registration happened, and whether anything on the encumbrance certificate is unaccounted for. The documents say all of this, at length, in deeply formulaic language that makes skimming both easy and dangerous.

Why it is hard

01

A chain breaks at the join, not in the document

Each deed is usually internally fine. The defect is that the person selling in 2009 is not the person who bought in 2003, and nothing in either document says so.

02

The encumbrance certificate is a list of entries, not an answer

Every entry has to be matched to a document in the chain. The ones that match nothing are the finding, and they only appear if every entry is checked.

03

Schedules are where the property actually is

Extent, boundaries and survey numbers in the schedule can shift between deeds in the same chain. A difference there is a question, not a typographical variation.

How we approach it

Kanoon IQ Citizen reads the documents together, extracts the parties, dates, extents, survey numbers and registration particulars from each, and assembles the chain. Breaks in the chain, unmatched encumbrance entries and schedule descriptions that change between deeds come out as specific flags against specific documents.

The output is a working file for an advocate, not an opinion. Every flag cites the deed and the clause that raised it, and the advocate who signs the opinion is the one who decides what it means.

What changes

  • The chain assembled from the deeds, with breaks shown at the join
  • Every encumbrance entry matched to a document or raised as unmatched
  • Schedule differences between deeds flagged rather than smoothed over
  • A flagged working file for the advocate, not a generated opinion

Next

Is this your problem too?

Bring the version of it you actually have. We will tell you what it would take, including when the answer is that it is not worth doing.