The lucrative 60 percent title insurance commissions that sweeten attorneys’ return in real estate closings are routinely being siphoned away to droves of unlicensed, out-of-state interlopers lacking a key legal qualification — they’re not lawyers.
That’s the class action claim that plaintiff John Q. Gale, a Hartford, Conn., real estate lawyer, is making in a federal complaint against 10 national title insurance companies. For him and hundreds of other locally admitted real estate attorneys, Gale is seeking to put a stop to the allegedly illegal closings, as well as the disgorgement of lost fees from most of the nation’s largest title insurers.
