In honor of SoftPro's 40th anniversary in 2024, Marc Isaacson of Isaacson Sheridan sat down with us and shared the story of when his team realized that they needed to start using SoftPro for their real estate closings.

Marc Isaacson began practicing law with is father in 1983. At the time, they were a general practice firm that did a handful of residential closings each month. "I got assigned the responsibility of helping to prepare for those residential closings with our paralegal," explains Marc, who goes on to list everything that was needed for those closings: title work, closing packages, HUD One closing statements... it was a lot of work to do by hand. "With no software then, we were just doing that manually," he continues. "Any change had to be manually done and recalculated so that was a real challenge because of the time pressure of getting ready for each closing."

Meanwhile, entrepreneur Loren Harrell recognized the problems that Marc, and many other attorneys, were facing, and envisioned how those problems could be solved with the latest personal computing technology. In 1984, Loren began visiting North Carolina attorneys' offices to demonstrate his brand new closing and title software, SoftPro. Marc and his team were among the first to receive a demo of the original SoftPro software on Loren's oversized portable computer.

One of the firm's partners was late to the software demonstration, so Marc and the firm's paralegal, Brenda, sat in on the meeting. About 30 minutes into the demo, the partner arrived and wanted to be brought up to speed. Marc recounts that Brenda had a very succinct summary for the the partner: "Brenda said 'You really have two choices here: you can either get this software or you can get a new paralegal. We really need this software to be able to prepare for residential closings.'"  

The team was firmly sold, and became one of the earliest adopters of SoftPro. Isaacson Sheridan has remained a devoted SoftPro customer for 40 years, and the team has enjoyed watching SoftPro expand to continue meeting the firm's needs as both companies have developed over four decades. Marc sums up his recollection with fondness, saying "So that's how we ended up buying software from Loren Harrell, and it's worked beautifully ever since." 

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