California County ACR Projects $1.4M in Annual Cost Savings with Document Processing Automation

Introduction

The Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder (ACR) Office at a large Southern California County is responsible for maintaining official public records. Substitution of Trustee and Reconveyance filings — critical to the mortgage payoff and lien release process — are particularly complex, requiring validation of legal language, notary fields, and payment accuracy.

Challenges

The ACR’s Office relies on a manual, labor-intensive process to record key documents in the mortgage and trust deed lifecycle, including Substitution of Trustee and Reconveyance filings. Document submitters must provide original signed and notarized forms, typically accompanied by applicable fees. Upon receipt, staff manually review each document for compliance — verifying legal descriptions, signatures, and notary acknowledgements. If compliant, fees are calculated and cross-checked against payment systems before documents are routed through quality control and indexing to confirm completeness and legibility.

This end-to-end process is time-consuming, error-prone, and difficult to scale. Compliance checks rely on subjective interpretation by reviewers, fee verification requires manual reconciliation, and quality control varies across submission types. The lack of integration with core platforms such as Eagle Recorder adds further inefficiencies and delays. As document volumes grow, human review processes must scale linearly, driving up costs and limiting operational efficiency.

The Solution

The ACR Office selected C3 AI Document IQ to streamline document analysis and compliance checks for Substitution of Trustee and Reconveyance filings. In just six months, the C3 AI team implemented a multi-agent framework to automate document understanding, compliance validation, and fee verification, while maintaining human oversight for auditability. C3 AI Document IQ ingested over 1,000 pages of the County’s reference materials — including Document Reference Information Manuals (DRIM), Notary Handbooks, Training Manuals, and Government Code for Fees — and codified 432 compliance rules. The C3 AI team tested the application on over 800 filings to train, tune, and validate its performance, enabling consistent, accurate, and auditable compliance checks across high volumes of submissions.

Results

C3 AI Document IQ transformed a once linear, labor-intensive process into a scalable, automated workflow. By using advanced machine learning to extract key document attributes, detect compliance issues, and validate fee parameters, the application achieved 95% compliance check accuracy, 92% indexing accuracy, and 88% fee calculation accuracy. Document reviews that once took hours can now be completed in just minutes, accelerating processing by 15x and delivering comprehensive compliance insights. These operational efficiencies are projected to unlock an estimated $1.4M in annual cost savings.

About the ACR Office

• Home to 2M+ residents — one of the most populous counties in CA
• Covers 7,000+ square miles
• Manages tens of thousands of public records transactions annually

Project Highlights

• 6-months from project kickoff to production-ready application
• Ingested 1,000+ pages from four data sources (Document Reference Information Manual (DRIM), Notary Handbook, Training Manual, and Government Code for Fees)
• Generated 432 unique compliance check rules for four categories (Recording, Fees, Quality, and Indexing) across the recorder workflow
• Demonstrated high accuracy in compliance checks:
  • 95% compliance check accuracy
  • 92% indexing accuracy
  • 88% fee calculation accuracy