News Article

Recently, Jonathan Groner worked on the Womble Carlyle New Orleans Pro Bono Project. Mr. Groner is an attorney who now works as a Senior Communications Counsel for the Firm.

During Hurricane Katrina last year, the New Orleans Convention Center served as a short-term refuge for thousands of residents whose homes had flooded. Today, a small corner of the center is functioning as a temporary storehouse for most of the real estate records of Orleans Parish. Documents, like people, sometimes need shelter from the storm.

For the Womble Carlyle lawyers who are working pro bono this summer to help the storm victims rebuild their homes and their lives, these documents are a crucial part of their work but are also occasionally their greatest source of frustration.

Once we interview a client and, in consultation with the New Orleans Legal Assistance (NOLA) office, agree to accept the case, the next step is to find the property records for that hurricane victim and his or her family. We need to prove the chain of title, account for all liens or mortgages on the property, and eventually build a case to create a “succession” under Louisiana law so that the client can receive federal or state aid or insurance money. That research task involves a fascinating blend of 21st-century Web technology with archaic systems built on index cards and dusty notaries’ ledgers that can weigh 30 pounds. This can be a complex undertaking.

The first day I was in New Orleans, Tripp Greason, the firm’s pro bono director, walked me and other Womble Carlyle newbies through the arcane, multi-step process. The first research step is simple and can be done online: Visit the city’s Web site at www.cityofno.com and find the client’s home address in the “Property Database.” That database provides a lot number and a property tax record that can be printed. Then the researcher goes to City Hall, a few blocks from the NOLA offices that are our home base, hands the property tax record to the counter clerk, and asks her for the conveyance information for that property. The regular clerk there, an always cheerful woman named Melissa Wilson, was extraordinarily helpful to our little group, none of whom had had any prior experience with Louisiana property records.

If all goes well, the City Hall records in turn produce a pointer to another record – a so-called COB number. COB stands for Conveyance Office Book, and this is where our tour moves from City Hall to the Convention Center, just over a mile away near the Mississippi River. The COB number looks like this: 327/195. That number would mean that we need to pull volume 327 off the shelf at the Convention Center and look at page 195.

Only a small part of the Convention Center has been walled off to house the property records. One enters through a side entrance that’s hard to spot even if one is looking for it. It’s open only from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily, and at any given moment, 50 to 100 tired but hopeful New Orleans residents are lined up on folding chairs, waiting to pay off their mortgages so they can rebuild after Katrina – or move out of the city. Older, younger, black, white – all of these people sit with calm resignation, knowing that it can take the better part of the day to find what they need and get their papers processed.

As researchers, we don’t have to wait in that line, but we can have problems of our own. The oversized COB volumes on the left side of the Convention Center space don’t always contain the information they’re supposed to. In the arcane system of records in Orleans Parish, the COB page number is itself only a pointer to a much more important number, the so-called NA (Notarial Acts) number. If we can’t find the right property address on the COB page, or if there’s no NA number on the page, our work on that particular property can come to a halt. Normally, though, we can find what we are looking for.

The NA books contain the full records of all property sales – the formal conveyance of the property, the survey, the mortgage documents, everything else. They are the definitive source of information on property in Orleans Parish. Once we find those documents, we are well on the way to filing the court papers that will helping our clients rebuild or recover. Of course, we need copies, and at the Convention Center, three temperamental copy machines will produce copies at $1.00 a page, reduced to 80 cents a page if you purchase a prepaid card.

Like the COB books, the off-white NA books, which fill the right side of the document room, can be difficult to use. I had to track one NA number from a real estate sale in 1955 and couldn’t find any book with a number remotely like that one. A friendly document clerk, a young woman with dark braided hair, took pity on me. She explained that all pre-1970 land sales in Orleans Parish were not categorized and filed by the date or by the name of the parties but by the name of the notary who attested to the transaction. I found the name of the notary for my 1955 sale and, in a small alcove in the back of the room, located my document.

This can be a long process. In planning our work, our team quickly realized that rather than wear out shoe leather or constantly search for cabs, we would do better by dividing our forces. Tripp deployed directly to City Hall, found all the COB numbers, and e-mailed them to us at the Convention Center, where we found the numbers on our Treos. A slight triumph of modern technology.

But tracking the conveyances of our clients’ property is only one part of our research. We also searched for mortgage or lien information on the property, even a $100 tax lien, to make sure that it had been paid off or would be paid off. Some mortgages and liens are easy to find at the Convention Center on the so-called “Orange Line” computers, which are literally found lined up on a long orange strip of tape on the bare floor. However, older liens and mortgages can be found only by looking at a set of index cards in a metal box.

Either way, a mortgage can be traced by going to an MOB (Mortgage Office Book). Like a COB, the MOB points to an NA number on the right side of the room, and so on. Liens are a bit harder to track, but the process is similar. If all goes well, we estimate that we can fully research one client’s property in three to four hours. Tammy Theriot, a Winston-Salem paralegal who worked with me in New Orleans in late July, said, “It’s not that different from what litigation lawyers and paralegals do in our regular work in the firm. It just requires that you be organized and detail-oriented. And in the end, we know that we’re helping people go on with their lives, and that makes it worth while.”