I very, very strongly recommend Kevin L. Stowe of KR Ventures, and his colleague Richard Ellis, as experts who can advise on and assume process control of legal and similar issues related to oil and gas and other mineral interests.
It is not possible to fully explain how much of an enormous help these folks were to me and my family when we were faced with understanding how to deal with roughly 20 oil and gas royalty interests, and mineral deeds, that had been acquired by my father beginning in the 1960s.
My father had passed away recently, at age 91, and my 89 year old mother had virtually no understanding of the properties and their relevance, except for her understanding that she received a royalty income stream from some of the properties. So after my father's death, my mother handed me a large box of documents related to these properties, hoping that I could sort them out for her and our family, by determining which were providing a royalty stream, and which might in the future, for her heirs.
But, the lease and deed documents may as well have been written in a foreign language, as far as I was concerned.
And as best as I could tell, the last time these documents were updated was some 19 years earlier. And the state and Federal websites where the information on such leases are archived were basically impenetrable to me. Fortunately, I was able to find Kevin and Richard, who instructed me on how to "interpret" these documents, and how to find and navigate the relevant websites, and then helped our family understand which of the hundreds of documents in those boxes were relevant, and which were not. Kevin and Richard looked at every single one of these leases and deeds and determined which were active and owned by my mother, which were no longer owned by my mother, and which of the active ones were actually worth something. Then, Kevin and Richard guided us on the document filings at the state and federal level that were necessary to ensure that after my father's death, the property ownership was correctly placed in my mother's name. Then, Kevin and Richard advised us on how to place ownership of these properties into an LLC, for estate planning purposes. They then provided an "Exhibit" that detailed the legal descriptions of the properties, for installment into an LLC Operating Agreement, an Agreement that should benefit subsequent generations of our family. All along the way, Kevin and Richard provided key contacts to individuals at the state and federal offices whenever that was required, as one of many essential components they provided, to allow us to complete the process of moving ownership of these leases and deeds into the LLC. And I will mention that when we determined that my mother was not being paid by one of the oil companies that was operating one of her producing properties, Kevin made contact on our behalf with one of his colleagues at that oil company, and was thus instrumental in correcting that deficiency.
Overall, I recommend these folks with my most sincere enthusiasm. Their knowledge and experience in this area is deep, wide, and longstanding. And they have many contacts in this field that serve to leverage their knowledge and experience. Finally, they have a remarkable ability to focus on getting the job done.
Our family feels very blessed to have been able to benefit from their talents.
John Lowe, KR Ventures Client