AB 1466 – Executing on The Final Plan

AB 1466 – California Counties have submitted their plans to the State on identifying and redacting restrictive covenant language found in recorded documents and on July 1 (really July 5), they are to report their progress executing on the plan.

AB 1466 challenges identified:

• Increased workload with a hard deadline but with no added staff
• Increased collaboration with Legal Counsel, who may be an external contractor
• Existing documents transformation to searchable tiffs: microforms, paper, static tiffs, or pdfs
• Specific export requirements for the redacted documents into the County’s system of record

A critical step of the process, to contextually highlight the restrictive language, is affected by the format of the original recorded document is it handwritten, or machine printed, on paper, unsearchable tiff images from the early 2000’s, microfilm, or microfiche. These are efficiently transformed to searchable tiff images with intelligent character recognition (ICR) occurring in WIS’ solution. This step is the most cumbersome and most critical part of the problem resolution – a virtual “long pole” in project management and a reverse timeline using the County’s end date for this initial phase of AB 1466 compliance is a best practice in the steps to resolution of this problem. WIS’ Imaging Center has the metrics to apply to the volumes of documents you have in order to determine the length of time it will take for each format to be transformed, searched and restrictive language highlighted in our smart learning software, Parascript.

A Project Management Best Practice Tip: While you’re transforming these hardcopy document sets, recorded documents that are already searchable tiffs or pdfs, should be the first batch to be processed for restrictive language to teach Parascript the specific words and phrases that are in your County recorded documents.

 WIS deploys Parascript, THE contextual intelligent character recognition software for handwritten or printed text, because it learns as it validates from your list and then highlights the restrictive words and phrases found in the existing searchable tiffs. The highlighted tiffs are then sent to our workflow application, which creates your coversheet, initiates the workflow between the Clerk and County Counsel, tracks the activity between the Clerk’s office and County Counsel (with searchable notes) for approval of the highlighted language. FileBound will then redact the restrictive covenant language once the County Counsel clicks “approve” and create a redacted and an unredacted rendition of the recorded document. A PRIA_MISMO Standard xml export (in addition to others, as needed), with the images is then ready for uploading into the System of Record.  Unredacted renditions can be preserved in FileBound for historical research purposes by the public, or for reprocessing as new restrictive language is identified.

The process activity reporting in the WIS solution includes what words and phrases are found by the date of the recorded document in addition to the activities of re-recording: who touched an individual document, how long it took to process a document from identification of restrictive language to when Legal Counsel approves and redacts to when it’s re-recorded by the Clerk.

Documents can be sent through the process more than once as language lists are updated with each version. These versions can be maintained in FileBound so that only the legally recorded version is in the County’s recorded document system of record.

Click to learn more California Legislative Information on AB 1466.