Practical Innovations in Title

Maureen Pfaff has run Olympic Peninsula Title in Clallam County, Washington for over twenty years, handling roughly 200–250 transactions a month across residential and commercial title work. In this conversation with TalosTitle, she walks through the realities of running a small family title company — including the challenge of passing hard-won expertise from veteran examiners to the next generation — and explains why she started exploring AI-powered tools to help bridge that gap.

What's covered in this conversation:

• The day-to-day workflow — how her team handles title searches using a combination of a digital title plant, county records, and physical books dating back to the 1800s
• Where the process gets manual — examiners still rely on handwritten legal pad notes to organize searches, which creates inconsistency for the typists who turn those notes into commitment reports
• The knowledge transfer problem — senior examiners with 35–40 years of experience are nearing retirement, and their expertise lives mostly in their heads
• What she was looking for in a tool — something that fits into existing workflows, is easy to pick up, and demonstrates value immediately without requiring a complete process overhaul
• How she approached adoption — starting with newer team members to build internal ambassadors before rolling out more broadly
• Early results — newer examiners feel more confident in the quality of their work; the tool creates a cleaner, more traceable record of decisions made during the examination process
• Advice for peers — do demos, talk to other title companies, and keep an open mind; the technology tends to sell itself once people see what it can do
• The bigger picture — companies that don't keep pace with tools like this risk losing market share to those that do, especially when the next refi boom hits