A Professional Skeptic of Signatures on Delegation, Defects, and Who Loses the House

Every system that lets one party act on behalf of another is making a bet. Every API key, every OAuth token, every delegated permission assumes the authority behind the action is real. That bet usually pays off. When it doesn't, someone has to figure out who bears the loss.

People have been professionally evaluating this bet for a very long time, though not in software. In the dense, unglamorous world of real property title examination, examiners spend their careers tracing chains of delegated authority through powers of attorney, corporate resolutions, and authorized signatory lists. They determine whether each person who signed a document actually had the right to sign it. When the answer is no, they map the consequences.

We wanted to talk to someone who lives at that boundary, where the record says one thing and reality might say another. So we invented one.¹

Delphine "Del" Grantham has been examining titles in Mississippi for thirty-eight years. She keeps a handwritten ledger of what she calls "interesting defects," which, by her count, now runs to four volumes. She agreed to speak with us from her office in Hattiesburg, which she described as "mostly filing cabinets at this point."

You've spent almost four decades deciding whether people had the right to do what they did. How do you describe that to someone at a dinner party?

Del: I tell them I'm a professional skeptic of signatures. That usually gets a laugh, and then they change the subject. Which is fine. Most people don't want to hear that the deed to their house rests on a chain of presumptions nobody has actually verified. It's like telling someone at a restaurant how the kitchen works. They'd rather just eat.

What do you mean by "chain of presumptions"?

Del: When I trace a chain of title, I'm going back through every conveyance, every time the property changed hands, linking names. The grantee in one deed should be the grantor in the next. And the universal practice, the thing that makes my job even possible, is to presume that when the names match, it's the same person. We presume the signature is genuine. We presume the grantor was competent. We presume the deed was actually delivered.²

We have to. If you tried to independently verify every one of those facts for every document in a chain going back a hundred and fifty years, the entire system would collapse under its own weight. So we operate on managed faith.

My job is to notice when that faith is misplaced.

When does it break down?

Del: The interesting cases are always about delegation. When someone signs not for themselves but for someone else. A power of attorney. A corporate officer. An LLC manager. That's where the presumptions get thin.

When a corporate officer signs a deed, I get a presumption of authority. The law assumes officers act within their powers unless I have reason to think otherwise.³ But when an attorney-in-fact signs? No presumption. None. I have to see the actual power of attorney. I have to verify it was recorded, that it grants sufficient authority for this specific transaction, that it hadn't been revoked, and that the principal wasn't dead or incapacitated when the agent signed.⁴

That's a long checklist.

Del: Every item on it is there because somebody, somewhere, got burned. Take the specificity requirement. A POA that says "handle all business affairs" is generally too vague for a real estate transaction.⁵ You need language that says convey, sell, mortgage. Words with teeth.

And self-dealing? Categorical red flag. If the agent conveyed the property to themselves, I need the POA to explicitly and unequivocally grant that power. Title companies will not insure around it.⁶ I've seen agents get genuinely offended when you question this. "But Mom wanted me to have the house!" Maybe she did. Show me where the document says so.

What about corporate transactions? An LLC buying a building?

Del: Same principle, different paperwork. The title company and the lender will require a corporate resolution, the actual board vote authorizing the specific person to sign for the specific property. If an LLC is buying a five-million-dollar apartment complex, nobody's letting the president sign the mortgage until they've seen that resolution. Because if the other owners later claim the president had no authority to put the company five million dollars in debt, that's a real problem.⁷

Here's the wrinkle with LLCs. A manager selling the company's sole asset is not "apparently carrying on the business." That transaction is extraordinary. I need to see the operating agreement, the articles of organization, the whole structure.⁸ The manager's title alone tells me almost nothing.

What happens when you find a defect?

Del: The first question is always whether it's void or voidable. That distinction determines everything.

A void deed passes nothing. Ever. A forged signature, fraud in the factum. There's an old court phrase I love: "void things are as no things."⁹ And the devastating part is that every conveyance downstream from a void deed is infected. You can have fifty years of innocent buyers, each one paying fair value, each one acting in perfect good faith, and if the original deed was forged, the chain is broken all the way down.

A voidable deed is different. The original grantor can rescind it, but if a bona fide purchaser has intervened, someone who bought in good faith without knowledge of the defect, that purchaser may hold good title.¹⁰ The original owner's remedy becomes a damages claim, not recovery of the property.

That's a permanent judgment you're making.

Del: It is. And time doesn't fix it. Curative statutes can heal procedural defects like a bad acknowledgment or a missing notary seal. But they explicitly do not create a presumption that the signature was authorized.¹¹

That's the line I keep coming back to after thirty-eight years.

So what do you do with a defect you can't cure?

Del: You price it. That's where the distinction between marketable title and insurable title comes in. All marketable title is insurable, but not all insurable title is marketable.¹² Marketable means a reasonable buyer, knowing everything, would still buy. Insurable means there's a known defect, but a title insurance company is willing to stand behind it at normal rates.

The defect doesn't disappear. It's just covered. And here's the part that keeps me up at night: the buyer who accepts insurable title is taking a gamble that the next buyer will also accept it. They might not. They might demand marketable title, and now you've got a cloud that affects resale value. You've inherited someone else's problem and made it your own.

Who ultimately bears the loss?

Del: The insurer pays the claim, then subrogates. They step into the insured's shoes and go after whoever created the defect.¹³ The agent who exceeded their authority. The notary who mis-attested. The title company that missed it. The loss travels up the chain until it finds the person responsible.

Title insurance exists because sometimes nobody was negligent and someone still loses. There's an 1868 case in Pennsylvania, Watson v. Muirhead, where a buyer lost his entire investment despite everyone doing their jobs competently.¹⁴ That case is essentially why this industry exists. The gap between the record and reality is where claims are born.

After thirty-eight years, what's the thing you know that most people don't?

Del: That the record is a representation, not proof. A corporate secretary certifies a board voted. I can't independently verify whether a quorum was present, whether the vote was obtained under duress, or whether the board was told the resolution was for a different property entirely. My tools are the record and reasonable presumptions.

And reasonable presumptions are, by definition, sometimes wrong.

Delphine "Del" Grantham is a fictional character. Her defect ledger, regrettably, does not exist, though several real examiners we spoke with admitted to keeping something similar.

Footnotes

1. Del Grantham is a composite character created for this piece. Her professional knowledge is drawn from published title examination standards and industry practice. ↩

2. Mississippi Title Examination Standards, Second Edition (August 1, 2021), Standard 2.2 and commentary. https://www.msbar.org/media/4709/mississippi-title-examination-standards-8312021.pdf ↩

3. Mississippi Title Examination Standards, Second Edition, Standard 7.1 (presumption of corporate authority). https://www.msbar.org/media/4709/mississippi-title-examination-standards-8312021.pdf ↩

4. Mississippi Title Examination Standards, Second Edition, Standard 5.1 (instruments executed by attorney-in-fact). https://www.msbar.org/media/4709/mississippi-title-examination-standards-8312021.pdf ↩

5. Consumer's Title Company of California, "Title Insurance Requirements for Power of Attorney (POA) Letters in California," August 22, 2025. https://ctccal.com/blog/title-insurance-requirements-for-power-of-attorney-poa-letters-in-california ↩

6. Ibid. ↩

7. Barnes Walker Law, "Corporate Resolution," Legal Glossary, May 6, 2026. https://barneswalker.com/legal-glossary/c/corporate-resolution/ ↩

8. Mississippi Title Examination Standards, Second Edition, Standards 8.1–8.3 (LLCs and partnerships). https://www.msbar.org/media/4709/mississippi-title-examination-standards-8312021.pdf ↩

9. Schorr Law, "The Difference Between a Void and Voidable Deed," September 27, 2023. https://schorr-law.com/voidabledeeds/ ↩

10. New York Fraud Claims Blog, "First Department Explains Distinction Between Void and Voidable Documents," February 6, 2018. https://nyfraudclaims.com/first-department-explains-distinction-void-voidable-documents-corresponding-fraud/ ↩

11. VirtualUnderwriter (Stewart Title), "Curative Acts." https://www.virtualunderwriter.com/en/underwriting-manuals/2013-1/UMTX00000154.html ↩

12. Trinh Law, "Marketable Title and Insurable Title in Real Estate Transactions," April 30, 2024. https://www.trinh.law/marketable-title-and-insurable-title-in-real-estate-transactions/ ↩

13. InsureTutor, "Subrogation and Right to Defend in Title Insurance." https://insuretutor.com/articles/subrogation-and-right-to-defend ↩

14. Steeg Law, "The Measure of Compensable Loss Under a Standard Title Insurance Policy," September 4, 2019. https://www.steeglaw.com/the-measure-of-compensable-loss-under-a-standard-title-insurance-policy/ ↩