The document already says it. Getting it out is the job.
What’s actually inside a lease, a deed and a title opinion? Week 1 told us where the time goes. Week 2 let land professionals say it in their own words. This week we open three documents up, field by field, and mark what is reachable and what still needs a person.
… shall pay to Lessor as royalty three-sixteenths (3/16) of the gross proceeds realized…
↓ the part a person has to extract
One value. Written in a sentence, on page nine, in an instrument that is filed as an image.
land professionals answered the Week 1 poll
of what they named was administrative, not judgment
lease provisions that come up often enough to matter
parts of the review that should stay human, in our view
It isn't missing. It's buried.
A lease knows its own royalty rate. A title opinion knows every curative requirement it raised. A deed knows exactly what was conveyed and what was reserved. None of it is lost.
It is written in prose, filed as an image, and therefore unreachable by anything except a person reading it again. That is why the answer to a simple question takes an afternoon, and why the same clause gets read four times by four people in the same month.
Three weeks of asking produced the same sentence in a dozen different forms, so this week we are going to be specific about it. One lease, one deed and chain, one title opinion. What is inside each, what is separable, and what is judgment.
The hours don't disappear. They move.
Every one of these is a symptom of the same thing. The content of the document is not reachable, so people compensate with their own time.
The same field entered three different ways, so somebody cleans it before it can be used.
The clause has not changed. Your certainty about it has, so you go back and check.
Typed once into the land system, once into the spreadsheet, once into the report.
Two systems disagree about the same tract and somebody has to decide which is right.
The file stops moving until somebody who is in a meeting gets back to you.
The cost shows up downstream, which is why it’s hard to see and harder to budget for.
How a question gets answered today
Prose in, prose out. A person is the index.
- Find the right instrument, then the right version of it
- Read the clause again to be sure of what it says
- Reconcile two records that disagree about the same tract
- Wait on the one person who already read it
- Re-type the same value into the land system and the spreadsheet
What has to be true for that to change
Not a tool. A precondition. This is the whole week.
- Every document classified, so the right one is findable
- Every provision returned as a value, not a page number
- One record per data point, entered once
- Conflicts surfaced automatically instead of discovered later
- Judgment left where it belongs, with the person accountable for it
Six instruments. Put them in order.
Below are six recorded instruments affecting one tract. Place them in a valid chain of title, earliest to most recent, then commit to your answer. You get one submission.
Unplaced instruments
Tap one to drop it into the next open position.
Your chain of title
Earliest at the top. Use the arrows to reorder.
Enter for your chance to win a $50 Amazon gift card
Everyone who enters before Friday 18 September goes into the draw. We will also send you the full Week 1 findings with your result.
One entry per person. Open to land professionals in the United States aged 18 or over. No purchase necessary. Winner drawn at random on Monday 21 September and notified by email.
Three documents. One a morning, all week.
One section a morning. Each one links to the full breakdown, and each breakdown is written as text, not just a diagram, so it can be searched and quoted.
We spent two weeks establishing that land teams lose the week before the analysis starts. This week is about where that time physically goes: into prose that nobody can query.
Monday's interactive asked you to guess how the Week 1 poll actually split. It is still open, and it is still an entry into the draw.
Twelve fields come up often enough to matter. Every one of them is written in prose, and every one of them ends up re-typed somewhere else.
- 1Primary term
- 2Secondary term and what holds it
- 3Royalty rate
- 4Pugh clause, if there is one
- 5Depth severance
- 6Shut-in provisions and payment dates
- 7Continuous drilling obligations
- 8Pooling authority and limits
- 9Surface use restrictions
- 10Assignment and change of ownership
- 11Extension and renewal options
- 12Legal description of the leased premises
Numbers match the marks on the document. None of them is a field until somebody makes it one, and that is the job, repeated once per instrument.
Eight fields on the instrument itself, plus the part no single document holds: the order. A chain is only as good as the instrument nobody filed, which is what today's interactive is about.
- 1Grantor and grantee
- 2Effective and recording dates
- 3Legal description of what was conveyed
- 4Interest conveyed, and the fraction
- 5Reservations and exceptions
- 6Burdens created or carried forward
- 7Recording reference, book and page
- 8Prior instrument relied on
The instrument that breaks a chain is almost never the one you are looking at. It is the one that was never filed, and nothing in the file says it is absent.