Tuesdays with Mary

A new year means a new slate of both challenges and opportunities. It’s also an opportunity for reflection on the lessons learned from the year before. Guest blogger Chris Morton, CEO of the American Land Title Association, did just that, looking back at what 2025 taught us about how critical title insurance’s real protections are in the 21st century. I’ll be back next week, but until then, I’ll let Chris take it away. Thanks, Mary! If 2025 taught me anything as I stepped into the role of ALTA CEO, it’s that the title industry continues to prove its value with [...]

Series: Land, Title, and Ownership in America at 250 Tuesday, January 13, 2026 Before there was an American nation, there was already a land problem. England didn’t arrive in North America with a single, unified system for land ownership. What it brought instead was a mix of traditions, assumptions, and paperwork — charters issued thousands of miles away, vague descriptions of boundaries, and a firm belief that land could be claimed, granted, and transferred by authority of the Crown. That belief mattered more than precision. Colonial landownership began with royal charters, many of which were breathtakingly broad. Some granted territory [...]

Tuesday, January 6, 2025 In 2026, the United States turns 250. That milestone invites all kinds of reflection; on independence, on institutions, on how a collection of colonies became a country. This year, I want to spend some time on an aspect that won’t be honored with splashy fireworks or trumpeted during celebrations - but that was entirely elemental and fundamental to this nation’s birth and its endurance: land. Who owned it. Who didn’t. Who thought they did. And what happened when those answers didn’t line up. Long before there was a Constitution, there were land disputes. Deeds overlapped. Boundaries [...]

Tuesday, December 30, 2025 When I was a kid, my grandfather had an answer for nearly every question I asked. “Go look it up.” I found this endlessly frustrating. I didn’t want a project. I wanted the answer. Just tell me. But it wasn’t a dismissal; it was an invitation to engage more deeply. Instead, he’d send me to the encyclopedias. I’d flip through the heavy volumes, find what I was looking for, and come back; sometimes satisfied, sometimes more confused than when I started. That’s when he’d ask the real questions: What did you find? What surprised you? What [...]

Tuesday, December 23, 2025 As the year winds down, it’s worth pausing to remember how many homes you helped move from idea to reality this year. How many keys changed hands because of your work. How many people crossed a threshold (their very own threshold!) for the first time.  This season is filled with memories being made in first homes; first holidays in a new space, first memories that will stick with them long past any closing chaos or move-in mania. And just as important, how many lasts happened quietly along the way. Final moves. Final sales after decades in [...]

Tuesday December 16, 2025 How much did your company have to pay to become TRID compliant? In every industry, there are moments when external forces change the cost of doing business. Sometimes those forces arrive with a press release. Sometimes they arrive buried in hundreds of pages of new requirements. Either way, the question for companies is the same: Who absorbs the cost? In lending and closing, we have lived through this before. When major regulatory changes reshaped disclosure, timing, and compliance expectations, technology providers were forced to re-engineer systems, workflows, and safeguards — often on aggressive timelines. And with [...]

Tuesday, December 9, 2026 “Now they tell me?!?!”  That was my first thought when I read about the Federal Trade Commission’s letter to the Texas Supreme Court about the American Bar Association. I didn’t grow up in a town with an ABA accredited law school, and going away to one wasn’t really a viable option for my family. The thought of being able to qualify for the bar through a different pathway — something that feels like a new idea today — makes you pause and realize how much opportunity in professional life has historically depended on geography, resources, and [...]

Tuesday, December 2, 2025 If you’ve been following our Excess Equity Watch series in The Legal Description, you know this area of law continues to shift under our feet. Ever since the Supreme Court’s 2023 Tyler v. Hennepin County decision, states have been revising (or at least reconsidering) how they should handle surplus equity after tax foreclosures. And now another significant case is headed to SCOTUS, with fresh implications for property rights and state processes. Pacific Legal Foundation has joined Pung v. Isabella County, a case the Supreme Court will hear this term. PLF is the same organization who litigated [...]

Tuesday, November 25, 2025 Every year around Thanksgiving, we hear a lot about gratitude.  Big, sweeping gratitude, the kind that belongs in greeting cards or glossy commercials.  I love occasions for big sweeping gratitude.   But most of the real thankfulness in life is built on smaller things. The ordinary things. The things you don’t notice until you’re old enough, or still for long enough, to realize how much they matter.  And how much you rely on them. For me, gratitude shows up in the basics: a warm house when the weather shifts, a familiar recipe that always turns out the [...]

Tuesday, November 18, 2025 Every so often, something comes along that reminds us who we are at our core; and how we got here. Ken Burns’ new documentary, The Revolutionary War, did that for me as Episode 1 aired on Sunday. If you haven’t watched yet, it’s worth your time. Burns has a way of slowing things down just enough for the past to speak directly into the present. A thread you might notice throughout the episode is the coupling of two concepts: Land and Liberty. For the colonists, those two concepts were inseparable. Land wasn’t just a parcel on [...]