Moving at the speed of the drill bit: Untangling thousands of parcels in Appalachia

In the oil and gas business, your reputation is your only real currency.

When a veteran landman makes a jump to a new operator, they aren’t just bringing their experience. They’re bringing their bench. They are telling their new C-suite “I know who can handle this, and I know who will fail.”

Five years ago, a long-standing client of ours made that jump. He landed at a company that had a massive Appalachian acquisition in front of them and a drilling schedule that was, to put it mildly, aggressive. He had a choice: roll the dice on a new firm or bring in the team that had never let him down.

He vouched for Oliva Gibbs. He put his neck on the line, and we made sure he didn’t lose it.

The Appalachia Minefield

Appalachia doesn’t forgive amateur hour. You’re dealing with century-old severances, complex heirship, and the technical nightmare of held by production status. The client didn’t just need title opinions. They needed to move. Fast.

The initial landmine? A chaotic web of depths and formations. We weren’t just looking at who owned the minerals; we were untangling exactly which layers of the Marcellus and Utica were secured and which were at risk. Most firms would have handed over a 50-page opinion full of “it depends” and “further curative is recommended.”

We don’t do “it depends.”

Moving at the Speed of the Drill Bit

Our Appalachia team at Oliva Gibbs didn’t just identify the risks: we triaged them. We aligned our “risk-dar” with the client’s operational reality. We learned how they perceived business risk and then we started making the calls for them.

Does this old lease hold the deep rights? Is the pooling language sufficient for a 10,000-foot lateral? We provided the answers, not just the questions.

Before long, the initial learning curve with the new team and the new asset evolved into a seamless operational rhythm. We developed a professional shorthand that allowed their team to stop worrying about the how and focus entirely on the what: executing the next phase of their growth. When you trust your counsel to evaluate risk with the same maniacal attention to detail as you do, the friction in the system vanishes.

The Five-Year Engine

What started as a single acquisition has turned into a five-year partnership. Thousands of parcels later, we are still the engine behind their Appalachian operations. We’ve handled the due diligence, acquisition title, and the ongoing drilling opinions. We’ve seen the ticking clocks come and go, and we’ve met every single one of them.

The Bottom Line

In this industry, “good enough” title is a liability that eventually explodes. You either do it correctly the first time, or you pay for it 10 times over in litigation or lost production.

We don’t just process files. We serve the relationship. We protect the reputations of the people who trust us. The landman who vouched for us five years ago? He looks like a hero today.

That’s not just legal work. That’s Oliva Gibbs.