How Does A Court Ordered Title Work?

Introduction to the Court-Ordered Title Process
So you’ve realized that the only or best solution to your vehicle title problem is to do a court-ordered title or a magistrate title, sometimes called a civil lien. How does that work? What do you get? What do you receive if we do the process for you? Well, to give a little insight, this question comes up a lot. When you place an order for a court-ordered title document package, what comes in the mail? We send it priority mail so you get it in two business days. You get this folder and it’s got a package of documents in three categories. You got left side, you got right side, and you have two sections on the right side—one with a paperclip, one loose. We’ll go into these here in a minute.

Confirmation and Quality Check Process
But the first thing that happens when you place your order is you will get a confirmation email that says your order has been received, it is in process. That happens within a few minutes. Usually about an hour or two later you’ll get another email that says “Hey, your documents are almost complete. Take a look at the screen to make sure that your name is spelled right, the VIN number is correct.” It’s just quality control to make sure that you look at everything one more time to make sure there’s no typos, make sure that the right address is on there. We want you to look at that because right after you verify that and authorize the printing, we will print this package of paperwork.

Shipping and Tracking Information
Then what’ll happen is usually an hour or two later you’ll get another email that says “Hey, here’s your tracking number.” It’ll be USPS priority mail, two business day shipping that says “Here’s your tracking number, you can track it going out to you.” We also track it. When we see that that package has arrived to you, we have one of our operations department staff contact you by phone. They will call you and say “Hey, did you get the package? Do you have any questions?”

What’s Inside the Package
It’s pretty straightforward. Basically what happens is each one of these documents—there’s a checklist—starts with a place for you to sign because most of it’s going to already be filled in. All these documents are not blank, they’re filled in with all your information. But the different agencies that need to get these—government agencies—have to have your signature. So we put little arrow stickers where you have to sign and we give you an envelope where to mail it to. We give you the envelope to mail it to the magistrate, to the DMV, to all the different places—maybe lien holders. We provide all that and there’s a checklist of when to send them and when to sign them.

Extra Steps for Convenience
For example, as a courtesy we normally will send out a prior owner request to have the prior owner sign over titles to make it easier so you don’t have to go to court. We also do the lien release request. All of the steps of that are located inside the package.

Vehicle History Report
In addition, we also will run a vehicle history and that vehicle history will have a notification to where if you want to get the official vehicle history from the government agency sent to you directly—because if for some reason it’s requested by the magistrate later—you’ll already have it. So we give you all those documents, all the dates and times, how to check it off.

Timeline Estimate
How long does it normally take? Well, the government agencies that process title documents—they’re not like FedEx or Amazon. When you buy something, they tell you “Here’s your delivery date, it’ll be here on this day.” Government agencies don’t have a timeline that way. They do it pretty much at their discretion. But for most clients we see about 12 to 14 business days is on average what it takes. Now that’s a big wide range to get to that average. Some people get it in a few days, some people get it in a few weeks. But for the most part it’s about 12 to 14 business days to get your title documents.

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