Why I Started Hopdox

My name is Paul Clifford, and I’m the founder of Hopdox. Before that, I founded Simplifile.

For 20 years, I had the privilege of working alongside counties, submitters, and industry partners to help introduce and expand eRecording across the country. Together, we enabled more than 2,500 counties and over 40,000 submitters for eRecording before Simplifile was acquired in 2020.

I was proud of what we built, but even more proud of the relationships behind it.

When I left, I expected to see eRecording continue to get better. Instead, over the next six years, I kept hearing the same frustrations from submitters.

Support was harder to reach. Innovation had slowed down. Prices and fees continued to climb, sometimes alongside volume minimums that made eRecording impractical. The experience was becoming more complicated when it should have been getting simpler.

And I kept hearing something else: submitters wanted a partner who actually listened.

That stayed with me.

So, with encouragement from the industry and my family, I decided to build Hopdox from the ground up.

We launched in January 2025, brought back many of the people I had worked alongside at Simplifile, and set out to bring back what made eRecording work in the first place: exceptional service, meaningful innovation, fair pricing, and relationships that matter.

For submitters, that means a simpler experience from start to finish.

We built Hopdox around the things that make your day easier:

• Smarter indexing. Hopdox pulls required indexing information directly from your documents, reducing manual data entry and helping you prepare packages faster and more accurately.
• Fewer rejections. Every document goes through a systematic recordability review before it reaches the county, helping catch issues before they become costly delays.
• Fast county coverage. Our experience with land record systems allows us to bring counties onto eRecording quickly. In our first year, we enabled more than 500 counties.
• Built-in protection. Hopdox detects sovereign citizen documents and flags them for the county in advance, helping protect the recording process.
• People who actually answer. Technology matters, but so does having someone on the other end when you need help. We built Hopdox around the belief that great support should be part of the product, not an afterthought.
• Fair, straightforward pricing. We believe eRecording should work for businesses of every size, without unnecessary fees or volume commitments getting in the way.

We're still early, and we're adding county coverage every week. But our mission hasn't changed since day one: Make eRecording Simply Better, for everyone involved.

If you're a submitter who believes eRecording should be easier, faster, more affordable, and backed by people who care, we'd love to have you join Hopdox.