Coastal Title Company has established a solid foothold along the Texas Gulf Coast with locations in Jackson County, Wharton County, and Calhoun County.  Now the company is nearing the completion of its fourth title plant in Goliad County.

The late Glynn McDonald moved to Jackson County in 1985, and began practicing law in Edna.  His wife, Carol, joined the firm in 1991.  Soon after moving to Edna, McDonald purchased Edna Abstract Company, a sovereignty-based card plant.  By 1991, Glynn had a vision of using technology to build title companies in surrounding counties.  Enlisting the expertise of hal Systems Corporation in Dallas, Texas, McDonald began to make that vision a reality.

Using halFILE for DOS, a document storage and retrieval software package from hal Systems Corporation, McDonald began scanning the Jackson County courthouse records.  He assembled a technical team and instituted procedures for scanning, indexing and archiving the recorded instruments on a go-forward basis.  Once the Jackson County system was in place, he looked for opportunities to expand.

In 1993, McDonald’s team moved into the Calhoun County Courthouse in Port Lavaca. Using two scanners, technicians scanned documents at the courthouse and transferred  images by tape back to the Edna office.  The indexing team reviewed the images on large-screen computer monitors and input information about each document into index fields.  Once a batch of documents were indexed, the images were transferred to optical storage.  The halFILE Search engine could then search the plant’s database for any combination of key words and display an image of the original document from optical disk.

A Texas title company must maintain a searchable geographical database going back at least 25 years.  The Calhoun County plant was licensed by the state in 1994, and Coastal Title Company was formed.

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Moving on to Wharton County

Although halFILE for DOS was able to handle the volume of recorded documents, McDonald wanted to take advantage of newer Windows technology.  He again turned to hal Systems Corporation and halFILE for Windows? when he began Coastal Title’s fourth plant in Goliad County.

halFILE for Windows is a robust, scalable document and imaging management system providing scanning, indexing, archiving, searching and e-mail functions.  Using Windows95, 3.x and WindowsNT operating systems, halFILE for Windows provides flexible and powerful database support.  User-definable indexes are built through data entry, bar coding or data extraction from external databases.  These key words are stored in an ODBC-compliant database such as Microsoft’s WindowsNT SQL Server.

Now, using halFILE for Windows, the Goliad County plant is nearing completion.  The Jackson and Calhoun County plants have since been converted to Windows95 and are run from WindowsNT SQL Servers in Edna and Port Lavaca.  The Wharton County plant is scheduled for Windows in 1998.  With four title plants along the Texas Gulf Coast, Coastal Title Company is an innovative force in the Texas title industry.

hal Systems Corporation (www.halfile.com) has been providing solutions for over 24 years and imaging solutions for the past 7 years.  halFILE is installed at over 100 companies across the country in a variety of organizations including government, medical, insurance and financial institutions.