Member Highlight – Underwriter: Cass Tinsley

Cass Tinsley, an LTAMS underwriter member, received his undergraduate degree from Samford University in 1990, and earned his law degree from Cumberland School of Law in 1993. He started his career in a small, general practice law firm in his hometown of Tullahoma, Tennessee, where he handled wills and estates, some insurance defense litigation, and a small amount of criminal defense work. However, it was the real estate portion of the practice that he enjoyed the most. After almost five years in private practice, Cass moved to Nashville to become Tennessee Claims Counsel for a major underwriter. A short two years later, Cass had the opportunity to move to Alabama as Agency Manager with this same underwriter. In 2003, Cass joined Fidelity National Title Insurance Company as Alabama State Agency Manager. Fidelity consolidated many of its back-office operations in 2010, and Cass joined the Area Office of the Fidelity Family of Companies. Since 2010, Cass has had responsibility for not only Fidelity agents, but also Chicago Title Insurance Company and Commonwealth Land Title Insurance Company agents in both Alabama and Mississippi.

In his more than 20-year career on the underwriting side of the title industry, Cass has seen the business move from paper policy jackets to electronically-generated documents and automated reporting. On the closing side, he points to video conferencing and the exploration of Remote Online Notarization and says:

Thank goodness for this technology! It has allowed our industry to flourish during the COVID Pandemic and helped the general public feel much more comfortable closing their transactions with us early on in the shutdown.

Cass notes that the title industry is full of knowledgeable people who readily share information and is unique in that competitors “come together for the greater good of the industry through groups like LTAMS.”

Cass particularly appreciates the opportunity to travel to visit with his agents and meet others in the industry and was not very familiar with Mississippi when his territory expanded to include the State in 2010. To do his job well, Cass feels that follow-through is essential and concludes that “one’s actions speak louder than his words.” Not every encounter on the job has a satisfactory resolution, however, as Cass discovered after a tornado struck downtown Nashville in 1998. He received a call from an insistent policyholder who demanded that he fix the steps to his house that were destroyed the previous afternoon. Cass says:

It took several very trying minutes to explain . . . that he needed to contact his Homeowners insurance carrier rather than his Title Insurance Company!

Since 1993, Cass has been married to the former Sabrina Mezick, a clinical pharmacist with the Veterans Administration Hospital in Birmingham. Their daughter Delany is a sophomore at Auburn, and daughter Audrey is a junior in high school. For the past several years, Cass has been active with the Sons of the American Revolution and other genealogical groups. When not working, he enjoys shooting sporting clays and hiking with his wife, “especially if there is a waterfall at the end.”