Two title insurers have filed suit against real estate closing firm Dickason Law Group and its affiliated title company, alleging at least $1.6 million in shortfalls to the firm's IOLTA account caused by “financial impropriety.”

Dickason Law closed on May 15, after the title insurers, Investors Title Insurance Co. and North American Title Insurance Co., pulled their title agency agreements with the firm and its title company, Prattus Title. Without title insurance, the firm could not issue titles and so was unable to perform real estate closings.

Jeff Schneider of Weissman, who is representing Investors Title, said that a forensic audit of the firm that is underway indicates between $2 million and $3 million in liability for his client. “We are aggressively pursuing the source of the loss,” he said.

North American Title is represented by Monica Gilroy of The Gilroy Firm, who declined to comment.

Matt Dickason, who is also named as a defendant, held a controlling interest in both the firm, which he founded in 2006, and in Prattus Title, which he started in 2011, according to the suits.

Dickason Law Group and Prattus Title employed about 35 lawyers, according to the firm's LinkedIn page. The firm handled primarily residential closings as well as some commercial ones.

An April audit by Investors Title uncovered “financial irregularities” in Dickason Law's IOLTA account, which is managed by SunTrust, its complaint said. The audit turned up a series of “suspicious” wire transfers totaling $1.6 million from the law firm's IOLTA account to a separate Dickason Law account managed by BB&T.

The BB&T account “had no legitimate use” related to the residential real estate closing transactions insured by Investors Title that Dickason Law handled, the complaint said, so there was “no conceivable legitimate purpose” for the $1.6 million in transfers.

Investors Title terminated its agency agreement with Dickason Law on April 23. By May 1, Investors Title started receiving claims on title insurance policies that the firm had issued, according to its suit. The claimants said the intended recipient had received none or only some of the mortgage funds that the firm was holding in escrow for residential closings.

According to a Google review of the firm posted in May, the poster had used Dickason Law for her mortgage closing three weeks earlier, and she had just found out that the seller's mortgage lender never received the funds from escrow. Consequently, the seller was still being asked to pay the mortgage. “About $170,000 is mysteriously missing,” the poster said, adding that she'd notified authorities.

More claims against the title insurer over residential closing transactions handled by Dickason Law are likely in the offing, Investors Title said.

Investors Title filed suit on May 14. The firm shut its doors and laid off its employees the next day.

Dickason Law's other title insurer, North American Title, likewise pulled its agency agreement, then filed a similar suit against the firm on May 29.

Dickason Law's bank accounts have been frozen as the title insurers conduct the forensic audit, according to court filings.

Dickason, along with Dickason Law Group and Prattus Title, “are cooperating fully with Investors Title Insurance Company's audit of the law firm's accounts and practices,” he said in a statement provided by his lawyer, Matt Pearce of Stovash, Case & Tingley.

“Dickason Law Group and Prattus Title have provided Investors Title with bank account statements, wire details, and other accounting documents. Investors Title has also been provided with full access to Qualia, the software used by Dickason Law Group and Prattus Title for real estate closing transactions. Because the audit is ongoing, the defendants are not able to offer any further comment at this time,” the statement said.

Investors Title's lawyer, Schneider, represented Morris Hardwick Schneider, one of the Southeast's largest residential real estate firms, in a 2014 suit against its majority owner, Nathan Hardwick IV, alleging that roughly $30 million was missing from that firm's trust accounts,

Nathan Hardwick is serving a 15-year prison sentence after a federal jury unanimously convicted him last October on 21 counts of wire fraud plus separate counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and making false statements to banks. Asha Maurya, the former controller for Morris Hardwick Schneider's closing operation, is serving a seven-year prison term after pleading guilty to a single count of wire fraud.

That case caught the attention of the residential real estate community in Atlanta and nationally, because of the firm's size and the magnitude of the escrow shortfalls. At its peak Morris Hardwick Schneider, which handled both closings and foreclosures, had about 800 employees in 13 states.

Fidelity ultimately spent $29.5 million plugging Morris Hardwick Schneider's escrow accounts, but the firm nonetheless filed for bankruptcy in 2015 because of an exodus of both clients and lawyers.