Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 10.djvu/61

35 PRACTICE OF LAW lAT NEW YORK CITY. 3$ business, and also suits of the equity calendar involving all vari- eties of conflicting interests of holders of liens on real estate. In- quiry may disclose that he himself had or controlled some wealth, and came to his height by a shrewdly made "corner" in a certain quality of bricks which builders at the opening of their working season had to buy of him on his terms. This example is typical, and others could be given. Within the last twenty years the local bar has endured a great loss of income in the matter of searching titles to real estate. Corporations formed for the business seem about to absorb it utterly. Twenty years more will tell the tale. The law of real estate, indigenous to our system, — English i^ par excellence j — ■ is the special pride of the profession. Owing however to a series of crude, unsystematized statutes since early in this century, pro- viding for a great variety of liens on file in a great number of places, no part of the law is so unpopular. A conveyancer frequently meets with an abstract showing by the frequent changes of title in the last twenty-five years that at the ordinary lawyer's charge for each change (not counting price of official searches) the bar has received fees aggregating the pres- ent market price of the real estate involved. And even at that, the examination of a title in this city is at best only an approximation to correctness. No one is incapable of error, and mistakes are brought home to the best conveyancers, including the title compa- nies. For instance, that a man in the line of grantors, recited as and on inquiry appearing to be a single man, should have after all by some form of marriage a wife who comes along inopportunely to claim her dower, is only one of the nightmares of the real estate lawyer. Yet our last legislature enacted that a wife should be heir to 2l share in her deceased husband's real estate. This spread such consternation in the profession that the law was repealed by the same session Ihat enacted it. In the leading law offices in ihis city one used to see posted a schedule of rates for examining titles, as fixed by the leading firms. These rates were then paid; but after the panic of 1873 this schedule was departed from, till now competition is so sharp that titles are sometimes examined at a loss to the conveyancer. In New York City searches must yet be made in seven different public offices against every owner past and present of the land under examination for about two score sorts of liens. Lawyers used to have to delay their business, and to bide the pleasure of