I started this career running title in county courthouses. Paper, dust, and a legal pad.
Twenty-eight years later, the AI tools I use every day process in hours what used to take me months in those courthouses.
Here’s what surprised me: the technology didn’t make that experience less valuable. It made it more valuable.
What the courthouse years actually taught
It’s tempting to think of manual title work as pure grunt labor, the thing we’re all glad to be rid of. But those years weren’t just about the work product. They were about building a mental model of how chains of title actually break.
You learn what a suspicious conveyance looks like. You learn which counties have recording practices that create predictable gaps. You learn that a “standard” clause isn’t standard the moment somebody’s attorney got involved in 1987.
None of that is written down anywhere. It’s accumulated exposure.
What automation actually changed
When the volume work is automated, what’s left is exactly the work that takes years to learn:
Structuring the deal
Reading the negotiation
Knowing when a “standard” clause isn’t standard
Deciding which title defect is material
In other words, automation didn’t replace the expertise. It removed everything that was crowding out the expertise.
I spend less time now confirming what a document says and more time deciding what it means. That’s a better use of a Certified Professional Landman, and frankly a better use of a client’s money.
To land professionals worried AI makes them obsolete
It doesn’t. But it does change what you’re being paid for.
If your value proposition is that you can read a lot of documents accurately, that’s genuinely under pressure. If your value proposition is that you know which documents matter and why, that’s more valuable now than it was twenty years ago, because the volume work no longer buries it.
The courthouse years weren’t wasted. They’re the reason I know when the machine is wrong.
Building out your land function? Let’s talk about where experience still has to sit in the process.