The high price of oil has spawned a lot of legal work since the first of the year, especially in the area of title examinations. Operators actually have enough money these days to budget for legal expenses that had been scrimped on after the last price crash. I’ve been doing a lot of “stand up” title examinations, meaning that I have to go to the various courthouses and search through the records myself. In the “old days”, landowners had “abstracts” that we borrowed and updated, and I examined the abstracts in order to render title opinions. It seems nobody has abstracts any more. The thumbnails below should link to larger images at Flickr. You may need to select a larger size when you get there. Even though I’ve been in oil and gas all these years, I still find it amazing that some of the currently producing leases are documents that are nearly a century old.