A dual-monitor examiner workbench that turns days of title research into one confident, same-day decision.
Sequoia is an internal desktop workbench for First American Title's global operations teams. Examiners read recorded documents on one monitor, build the legal chain of vesting on the other, and apply conditions, exceptions, and exclusions to individual properties. The MVP shipped in Arizona, California, and Texas and put same-day title insurance decisions within reach at national scale.
Title decisions live at the intersection of legal ambiguity, county-level document quirks, and enterprise scale. Every state — sometimes every county — has its own recording conventions, and examiners globally had never had a single place to reason across them.
Examiners toggled between a document viewer, a legacy vesting tool, a policy database, and Excel to keep track of parcels, blocks, and lots.
The same easement or CC&R could apply to one lot, a block of lots, or an entire subdivision. There was no consistent way to express that in the tools.
Reviewers re-derived the vesting chain from scratch because nothing captured how the prior examiner had reasoned about it.
Operations spanned the US, India, and the Philippines with different training baselines, which amplified every ambiguity in the workflow.
Good title work depends on expert judgment. The software should make that judgment easier, not harder.
Title decisions once required experts to reconcile information across disconnected systems. Sequoia consolidated those records into one canonical source of truth.
Before Sequoia
County GIS
Property Record
Deed Index
Current Owner
Lien Registry
Liens
Assessor
Tax Records
Underwriter
Manual Review
After Sequoia
Canonical Title Record
Validate → Review → Decision
10+ systems
became
1 trusted record
Days
became
Hours
The Challenge
Title decisions required experts to reconcile information across multiple disconnected systems before they could confidently issue a policy. Every exception introduced additional manual verification.
The Shift
Sequoia unified fragmented title records into one trusted source of truth, reducing reconciliation and accelerating title decisions from days to hours.
Title examiners worked across PDFs, spreadsheets, and three legacy tools. A single file took days to clear, and same-day insurance was aspirational rather than operational.
First American already owned the data — recorded documents, prior policies, legal descriptions. Consolidating that into one examiner workspace could compress the entire decision loop.
MVP launched in AZ, CA, and TX with a 62 percent reduction in average time-to-clear and same-day decisions on the majority of qualifying orders.
Every surface in Sequoia is built around one file, one examiner, and one confident decision. The final MVP focused on the six areas that had the highest impact on time-to-clear and reviewer confidence.
Examiners lost minutes per file switching between a viewer, a legacy tool, and Excel.
Context switches per file dropped from double digits to near zero.
Every surface ships from a shared system — tokens, components, and patterns documented so future teams can extend the product without re-deriving its rules.
Designed to support standardized same-day title processing.
Unified fragmented examination workflows into one experience.
Created consistent examination workflows across teams.
Transformed dense property information into fast, scannable interfaces.
Built collaboratively with title examiners, product managers, and engineering.
Created reusable workflows supporting future operational expansion.
Sequoia reimagined title examination as a connected enterprise platform. By standardizing decision-making and surfacing complex property data in clear, actionable interfaces, the product helps title teams move faster, reduce ambiguity, and make consistent decisions at scale.
Modeling the vesting chain as a first-class visual object was the single decision that unlocked reviewer trust. It stopped being a document review tool and started being a shared source of truth.
How much of the workflow was chip-driven. Reviewers made triage decisions from the collapsed card summaries far more than from opening any modal, which reshaped how I prioritized fidelity.
I would have introduced the layer-hierarchy card in week one of prototyping instead of week four. Every earlier decision had to be revisited once we saw how much clarity it created.
Every case study in this portfolio began with a complex problem, an ambitious team, and a decision to build something better. If you’re solving the next one, I’d love to help write its success story.
