Law, Strategy, and Risk in Commercial Disputes
Big Oil v. Royalty Owners
Who said Big Oil can't beat Texas royalty owners?
Not Blawgletter. And definitely not the Supreme Court of the Lone Star State.
Royalty owners typically become that by granting your ExxonMobils, your Conocos, your BPs, and the like the right to drill for oil and gas. The lease contract calls…
Blawgletter adores cases that involve energy — oil, gas, wind, sun, nuclear, electric, tidal, you name it. We tried one last May in Texas and another last month in Louisiana — and look forward to trying a Great Many others, within Texas and without.
Which made us smile today at Judge Posner's opinion yesterday in…
You know that word choice matters. Twain's lightning versus lightning bug comes to mind.
What about spelling? Well, the tumult over a key part of a way to complete a sideways oil and gas well shows that spelling matters too.
The Supreme Court of Texas explains the process thus:
As in other shale formations, wells…
Talk about cutting a backlog.
The Supreme Court of Texas issued rulings in 19 cases this week, setting a record for the year if not for all time. The oldest case, City of Dallas v. Albert, No. 07-0824 (Tex. Aug. 26, 2011), started its Supreme Court journey in April 2007 — four years and…
Mark Twain said the difference between the right word and almost the right word means the difference between "lightning" and "lightning bug".
Tell that to the Andersons of Mountrial County, North Dakota. The family lost a case because "drilling" doesn't mean the same thing as "drilling operations".
On May 3, 2004 and May 10, 2004, they…
Blawgletter's firm handles much of our work on a contingent fee basis. That means we share risk with our clients — and earn no fee if we don't help our clients get a good result.
What counts as a good result will vary from case to case. It often involves a money inflow, sometimes not…
A federal judge asked Blawgletter a few years ago what we thought about "cy pres" (sounds like "sigh pray") payments in class actions. The judge had in mind a method of dealing with money that a class settlement or judgment produces but that for one reason or another doesn't find its way into…
People outside of Texas sometimes ask if you own an oil well — or raise cattle or wear boots and a Stetson or really want to secede – right after they learn you live in any of the 254 counties that comprise the Lone Star State. You'd expect that sort of thing from outlanders. We've done such…
The strange case started almost two decades ago in New York. On the motion of Texaco — later Chevron — it wound up in Lago Agrio, Ecuador.
In it, a group of Ecuadorians claimed that Texaco/Chevron's oil and gas operations in their home land caused bad problems. The court in Lago Agrio named an expert to help figure…
May a working interest owner in an offshore oil and gas lease avoid paying a share of the cost of decommissioning a platform that the lessee used to produce from the lease? If you had a Farmout Agreement like the one between predecessors in interest — the PIIs — of Apache Corporation and W&T Offshore…