Some may not be fully verified, though
When Orleans Parish Civil District Court opens for the first time in 2011 on Tuesday, some of the clerk's office staff will be bleary-eyed from yet another all-nighter.
On Tuesday, Civil District Court workers will be able to open the office doors and offer title researchers and others a complete -- if not totally verified -- database of New Orleans real estate records for the first time since a disastrous October computer crash.But if Clerk of Court Dale Atkins' expectations hold, the weary workers will be able to open the office doors and offer title researchers and others a complete -- if not totally verified -- database of New Orleans real estate records for the first time since a disastrous October computer crash.
Atkins said two different companies have made sure that tens of thousands of documents lost in that Oct. 25 computer meltdown have been restored to searchable databases, both in the parish's conveyance division and its mortgage records division. But all will not be back to normal. Most of the data from the last year and a half of records will appear on computer screens with a warning message: "Data has not been verified."
Atkins is downplaying the significance of that possible hangup. She said there's always a lag between logging the real estate data and independently verifying it.
"We still have to do the verification process, but the users know that and are familiar with that," Atkins said. "They're used to seeing that message, and as the records get verified it will change. We're back, from our perspective, to being fully operational."
She expects all of the restored records to be fully verified in the next four weeks.
The crash was a perfect storm of failures. Three servers failed at once. The only indexes for the paper records on file were all computerized and totally wiped out. The backups were also lost because of a snafu with a software update a few months before the crash. The backup contractor, i365, has blamed the court's two-person information technology staff, although at least a couple of judges are defending the chief information officer, Tynia Landry.
Meanwhile, more confusion was caused by the structure of the clerk's office and the court's computer system. The clerk is the custodian of the records and responsible for their maintenance, but she must rely on the technology staff and computers provided by the court's judges, which meet in private to decide on judicial financial matters. As court clerk, Atkins was left to hire contractors to replace the data, even while the judges were hiring other companies to try to recover data and get the servers functioning again.
Atkins estimates the whole process of replacing the data and verifying it, using contractor Windward Group and an expanded staff of more than 108 people working nights, weekends and holidays, will cost more than $300,000.
Brent Laliberte, the owner of Bayou Title who has been trying to find solutions for the stymied real estate industry during the crisis, said there's a big difference between a short verification lag for newly filed records and a year and a half of mostly unverified data. Still, he said Atkins and her staff have worked hard to get the records back into working order and title companies should be able to work with what they've managed to restore.
"It's not a perfect world, but given the fact that underwriters are looking for ways to keep business going, it certainly puts us in a better position," Laliberte said. "We feel better about it. It's a lot closer to 100 percent accurate now than at any time in the last six weeks. We've been employing a lot of redundant searches to make sure we don't miss anything and we'll just continue with that until such time as that thing is fully verified."
On New Year's Eve, all 35,000 conveyance records that had been wiped off computer servers were back in place and 95 percent of the 119,000 lost mortgage documents had been restored. The records were all indexed and uploaded to the appropriate searchable systems by 5:30 a.m. Monday, Atkins said.
The few thousand mortgage records that didn't make it back into the computer system by the weekend were all documents that are recorded separately by the secretary of state's office and were kept all along on a separate system in the office, Atkins said.
In the initial weeks after the computer crash, there was confusion over who was at fault, who was responsible for restoring the records and who should be hired to do the work, and Laliberte was critical of the slow reaction. But now he generally lauds Atkins for the speed of the recovery.
"I think Dale's done a pretty decent job here. I have to commend her. She's invested a lot of time and energy on this. She's done a lot of things she needed to do to get it done," he said.
David Hammer can be reached at dhammer@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3322.