bank or attorney at fault for lien in our name?

[ne1helpme?]

What is the name of your state? pa

Hello,

I am in search of a Legal Malpractice Attorney to handle what i think is a possible case. My wife and i are beneficiaries of an estate. The estate attorney that i am currently working with seems to have made a major mistake. my wife and i wanted to keep the house that was part of the estate, so we needed to pay off all of the estate's bills (credit cards, utility bills, etc..) to be able to transfer the property into our names because there were no liquid assets. we had borrowed $14,000 from a family member on top of what we paid to pay off the rest of the estate's bills. before we transfered the property into our names, i had the attorney do a title search to make sure that there were no liens on the property. we transfered the property into our names in december 04. i went to take out a home equity loan and now i am not able to because there is a $61,000 lien on the property and now WE are responsible for it because the lien follows the property and the property is in our name. now, we are unable to pay back our family member the $14,000 that we owe, and we have about the same invested into this estate (attorney fees, funeral expenses, misc). the attorney we were working with is no longer working with the law firm for some unknown reason. since we were misinformed about the lien, are they responsible to take care of this? The attorney that we are now dealing with tells us that we are responsible for this lien and we need to decide if we want to assume a mortgage or just want to sell the property. the attorney has contacted the bank where a 3 new mortgages were obtained after this outstanding lien. our attorney said that the bank where these 3 mortgages (all are paid off, they were refinancing for lower rates each time) had been taken out, there was NO title insurance issued on ANY of the loans. the bank "conveniently" lost the paperwork for the one lien and said that it happens. so now, i do not know if there was any title insurance out there. i am sure that the bank is not too worried about it because the deceased had life insurance on the mortgage so they were paid in full. i guess my questions are 1. am i responsible for this lien if my attorney told me that there were no liens on the property? 2. is the burden of proof on the bank that there was no title insurance since they lost the settlement statement? 3. if we do have a case, what fees would be involved, since we have most of our money tied up into this estate and now we were thrown a curve ball?

i have all emails from the attorney showing that the title search was done and that the original attorney told us that the liens were taken care of.

if you think that we have a case, please advise at your earliest convenience.

thank you for your time