Custom Abstracting
Senior Texas landmen and landtechs, working with our normalized county data, our OCR'd document corpus, and our abstracting automation at their disposal. Three to five times the throughput of a typical title abstractor building runsheets in Excel, at a comparable day rate.
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The speed advantage
A traditional contract landman builds a runsheet by working forward through the courthouse index, hand-typing each instrument into a fresh Excel workbook, looking up parties one row at a time. Solid craft, but it scales linearly with hours.
Our abstractors start every engagement on top of a county that's already harvested, OCR'd, normalized, and indexed. Names are already collapsed to canonical entities. Wells are already joined to abstracts. Cross-references are already linked. The abstractor's time is spent on the work that actually requires judgment, chain construction, abstractor's notes, curative recommendations, instead of records-stitching.
Operators of our automation stack, runsheet generation, entity resolution, document retrieval, OCR pass, chain seeding. They turn raw records into a working draft in hours, not days.
Texas-experienced abstractors who finish what the landtech started, judgment calls on instrument classification, abstractor's notes on every row, plain-English chain memos, curative recommendations.
You pay roughly what a contract landman day-rate runs in the market. You get the throughput of a small team because the data, documents, and automation come with the engagement at no additional charge.
The 3–5x figure is observed throughput on internal builds versus our prior contract-landman benchmarks for the same work product. Mileage varies by county, instrument density, and engagement shape.
When the day-rate model fits
You inherited a portfolio with chain-of-title problems and need a landman working them down over weeks or months. Not a single deliverable, a stream of curative deeds, AOHs, ratifications.
Title litigation, boundary dispute, mineral conveyance dispute. You need a senior Texas landman's research, written analysis, and (if needed) deposition or trial testimony.
Your land department is short-staffed during a campaign. Drop a senior landman in alongside your existing team for a defined period.
You have a moving target, new tracts coming into scope, frequent re-prioritization. Day-rate is cleaner than per-deliverable scoping each time.
Inside-the-tent landman work alongside your deal team during diligence. NDA-first, embedded with your counsel.
Senior landman QA on a junior team's work, periodic file reviews, mentorship for newer landmen on your staff.
How it works
AFE billing · pass-through services
This is the structural feature that makes us frictionless for E&P operators, broker shops, and consulting landmen: every invoice is a service-delivery bill in landman line items, full-day or half-day rates plus documentation fees. Bill it to your AFE. Pass it through to your client. Code it to your land budget. The accounting treatment is identical to bringing a contract landman onto the file; only the throughput is different.
Tell us how your client or AFE needs to see the bill, and we'll structure it that way. Talk to us about an engagement →
Outsourced abstracting
If you have an in-house land department, examiner pool, or title shop and you just need more capacity that fits your existing process, that's what we do. We'll match your runsheet template, your column shape, your tag vocabulary, your delivery cadence, and plug into the workflow you already run.
Send us a sample workbook and we'll match it, column order, tag vocabulary, tract-numbering convention, abstractor's-note tone, footer disclaimers. Our deliverables look like they came from your team because, structurally, they did.
Daily run drops to a shared folder, weekly batch handoffs, ticket-driven per-tract pulls, an inbox we both watch, whatever your land department already runs. We adopt it; we don't ask you to adopt ours.
Standing capacity at a day rate, scaled up for a leasing campaign or a litigation push and scaled down between waves. No hiring cycle, no benefits load, no off-season carry, and no learning curve, because the work product slots straight into your existing review process.
NDA-first. White-labeled if you need it. Sign your client, not us. Tell us about your workflow →
Custom Abstracting vs our other offerings
| County Foundation | Tract Runsheet | Custom Abstracting | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Engagement shape | Fixed-fee deliverable | Fixed-fee deliverable | Day rate / retainer |
| Scope | Whole county | One tract | Open-ended / ongoing |
| Typical buyer | Fund / operator / title co | RE pro / landman / fund | In-house counsel / GC / land VP |
| Best for | Strategic / portfolio | Per-transaction | Ongoing work / litigation / staff aug |