How a commitment to customer service, and a long-time friend, turned a midtown N.Y. settlement attorney into a data security pioneer
T tense moment of our interview had arrived, and Christopher Gulotta held a long pause. "I can get in a lot of trouble here," he finally said. The question: Whose pasta sauce do you prefer? Your grandmother, your mother or your wife’s?
Gulotta is founder and CEO of The Gulotta Law Group, Paradigm Title Agency & Settlement and Real Estate Data Shield. Born and raised in Middle Village, Queens, N.Y., during the ‘60s, Gulotta lived out a childhood often depicted on screen — kids playing baseball in the street, parents on porches sipping a drink and enjoying a cool summer night — a halcyon neighborhood in all respects. His mother stayed at home until the children hit high school, and his father owned a chain of delis in Manhattan. He’s proud of his small community upbringing and Italian-American heritage, both of which played a part in cultivating one of his fiercest ideals: Loyalty.
Beyond the confines of his neighborhood, over the bridge, there couldn't have been a bigger contrast, with that of a bustling, no-nonsense, fast-paced metropolis. Growing up, the opportunity to cross over the Queensboro Bridge and take on the challenges of the big city intrigued him. So, he went after it, and eventually he chose to get into law with the goal of handling high-profile, multimillion-dollar corporate transactions.
"I didn't like litigation where 95 percent of the time you write self-serving and condescending briefs, complaints and memos in a closed library, and only 5 percent of the time you are actually in court," he said. "In transactional law, you're in a conference room, up against the other side, who might have more leverage and more resources and you have to use all of your skills, thoughtfulness and perception to navigate your client somewhere further."

Gulotta went to Fordham Law School and worked full time at a major law firm as a clerk for all four years. After school, he worked at a similar corporate law firm doing commercial real estate and corporate transactions. It was the exact career that he wanted, but about seven years in, he realized that the big firm culture wasn't ultimately what drove him.
“I wanted to strike out on my own and create my own firm,” he said. “I wanted to work with smaller clients doing the same types of corporate, real estate transactions, but $1 million to $5 million instead of hundreds, and where I’m actually working one on one with the owners.”
So, he did. And in the middle of a recession, nonetheless.
“Now, the title part is the easiest part of the process,” he noted. “That’s logistics, mechanics, management and due diligence. The settlement side is where it gets tricky. It is logistically challenging handling spikes in volume, drops in volume, different types of products, different lenders and their preferences and learning what the banks need — whether they know it or not — and whether competitors are offering it or not.”
Within five years, Gulotta Law Group was representing most of the leading institutional lenders on the settlement side, inching from 50 closings a month to 100, then 200, then 300, then 400. Suddenly, business was so good that it was a major issue.
From the virtue of loyalty comes the business goal of best-in-class customer service, and customer service is Gulotta’s main objective, at all times. It drove him to start up his own firm and do things his way; it drove him to launch Paradigm Title to better handle his lender clients’ transactions; and it led him to telling the head of vendor management for a major client, in 2001, when 400 deals a month were coming in, to deactivate his account for two months so his firm could have the opportunity to better prosecute the files already in the shop.
“The pipeline had swelled up, and the quality of our product was no longer at our standards,” he said. “Sure, I lost significant revenue short-term, but I wanted to protect the brand. Like in a restaurant, if 10 times the amount of customers come in, you can open more stores, add more tables, hire more cooks, but at some point the pasta tastes horrible. When we temporarily deactivated that account, I looked at where we and the process generally broke down. I also looked at what lenders and customers were saying when complaining about all their title and settlement vendors during this time.”
Gulotta identified the issues from all perspectives and created a new process map for title and settlement closings. This intentional stop in business gave Gulotta the opportunity to reflect and retool and led to an overall improvement in his company’s operations and a giant leap forward in customer service, adding in the capability for clients to track their files in a web-enabled database.
“They could look at a file and say, ‘you received the file and didn’t order title for six days — you dropped the ball.’ It gave them complete transparency. It was a big culture shift on our end. Knowing they could be called out at any moment caused the team to raise its game dramatically. That process is what really catapulted the brand.”
“I always put my clients’ interests ahead of mine. If a vendor manager calls me up and says they have 75 files with another firm that they are cutting off — for whatever reason — and they ask if I can take the files and close them out, even though I will lose money — I never say no, but I’ll also make it my job on the back end, to make sure I see where the wheels could come off and proactively address each potential issue before it ever arises.”
“The best time to really learn about yourself or your business is when things break down and fall apart.”
Christopher Gulotta
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“The best time to really learn about yourself or your business is when things break down and fall apart,” Gulotta said. “So when business swelled, I realized it was too good to be true, and it was.”
For as incredibly robust as the middle 2000s were, the equal and opposite reaction came crashing down in the second half of 2008. Gulotta recalls seeing an 80 percent drop in volume. He had to cut 65 percent of his staff. Competitors and clients alike laid off scores of staff, or if they couldn’t survive, dropped out of the business altogether. Anyone connected to the mortgage industry during that time definitely felt the pain and certainly has their own horror stories, but the key to Gulotta’s story is his response after getting to the other side of the chasm.
“As soon as I saw business starting to come back, I hired back anyone I laid off,” he said. “Within a month after that I saw it growing still, and I hired another seven or eight top people from other firms who were laid off during the crash. I was willing to eat the added loss — the continued loss —because I knew during this spike in volume, if I didn’t jump on these files and pursue them 115 percent, I’d be doing my clients a disservice, and I’d be blamed for part of the delay.”
Another Gulotta mantra: Always feel like you are rounding second base. Can’t slow up. Can’t get too high or too low.
One day, when Gulotta was about five years old, he met his future. There was no way to know that at the time though. His name was Paul Schwartz. Paul's mother was working with Chris' mother on a PTA project, with Paul tagging along. Chris and Paul played in the living room that day and became best friends. This friendship continued through grade school, high school, law school and on to today, when, suddenly, the business lives of these childhood friends collided in an entirely new, intriguing, frightening and exciting way.
Schwartz eventually became one of the country’s top privacy and data security experts. He works at U.C. Berkeley as a law professor and as the Director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. If at some point during this nearly 40-year friendship, if either got too mad about losing a race (both are competitive, especially with running — Chris says he had more talent, but Paul had more focus) or lost touch after Paul moved to California, it’s possible the latest chapter in Gulotta’s life would be left unwritten.
About two-and-a-half years ago, in conversations with Schwartz, it started to sink in that the title insurance industry might have a new issue to deal with, that of data security.
“It was Paul bringing it up and explaining to me almost three years ago that by his reading of Gramm-Leach-Bliley, which covers financial institutions, that it definitely extended out to title and settlement firms trafficking in non-public personal information,” Gulotta said.
Another Gulotta mantra: Approach life like driving – don’t look at the car in front of you; look out as far ahead as you can and get the benefit of extended foresight.
When Schwartz first brought this to Gulotta’s attention, no one was thinking about data security risks in the title industry, not even his clients and customers. But the realization that this was a pertinent, potentially looming issue for his company and the industry, led him to do another deep look at his company, similar to when he shut the spigot off in 2003. He hired a privacy lawyer from a mega law firm in New York. He drafted policies and procedures and trained his staff on the new reality.
“In the vendor agreements, lenders have the boiler plate language that you agree you comply with all federal consumer laws and privacy laws,” Gulotta said. “But the industry as a whole is just now starting to realize this and genuinely embrace compliance.”
He did this for the reasons he usually does something: It was in his customer’s best interests and gave his company an edge in an issue no one was considering. But this issue was bigger than most others he had encountered.
“During that process, I realized it was so inefficient,” he said. “We, as an industry, shouldn’t have to pay individual lawyers all over the country enormous amounts to construct these new agreements from scratch and adopt policies and procedures, for every agent in the industry. There wasn’t a one-stop solution, a company specializing in just privacy and data security solutions for our industry in an easy to implement format and available at a much more cost-effective price point. It was an emerging area of law being applied to an industry that hadn’t embraced it yet.”
Gulotta and Schwartz thought they needed to disseminate this information to a wider audience. So, they did. In fact, they worked to build a company and solution around this emerging issue. As he noted, this is an expensive problem to solve, and nothing out there specifically fit the unique properties of the settlement services community. The focus of Real Estate Data Shield, the company formed by Gulotta, Schwartz and Richard Purcell, an award-winning developer of Web-based education and training courses and formerly Microsoft’s original Privacy Officer, is filling in these data security gaps for industry professionals. Now that lenders and regulators are paying more attention, and now that the American Land Title Association has included data security as part of its Best Practices, the chats between Gulotta and Schwartz, and their conclusions, have gone mainstream.
“I had the idea of delivering to our industry these compliance tools they needed that I had just struggled and spent a lot of money to define, create and implement,” Gulotta said. “If you have to go out and get these different tools, it takes you away from your main goals, your business, it will cost you a lot of money and it’s confusing. Since I’m in this industry, in this boat, I know where the holes are. I learn every day where the holes are and learn what the seas are like. I’m able to customize the products to protect companies in our industry to protect consumers, satisfy regulators and help lender clients.”
Closing high-priced New York real estate, working with institutional lender clients, and trying to solve the amorphous data security/lender liability issue hanging over the title industry seems like enough to keep one guy busy, which is why I let it slide that he was 10 minutes late for our interview.
“I was up at 5 a.m. to watch my DVR of the Tour de France, and I just missed the train because of it,” he chuckled.
Gulotta still finds time to run, ski, cycle, hike, watch old war movies and follow the sports he is passionate about —especially Penn State football now that his son attends, studying, what else, risk analysis and data security.
“He made that decision on his own, I swear,” he said.
His best friend was definitely integral throughout his life and with this latest venture, but he said without his wife Teresa, handling all of this at once would be impossible. She was a settlement paralegal for over 20 years and is now the office manager of Gulotta Law Group.
“Everyone here would tell you that without her, in this office, every day, taking care of 50 percent of the crisis-level issues a CEO would otherwise take care of, this would not be happening,” he said. “She can jump into any matter or leadership role at the drop of a hat.”
It might be a good time to note that he did finally say his wife’s pasta sauce was the best.
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