So I negotiated a lease with SEP on a 25% interest in mineral rights parcels I own in WV about a year and a half ago. They were slow to pay the lease amount and eventually a guy reached out to me and said that they weren’t sure if I owned the land or not. He sent me a workup from Purple Land Management showing some probate work on everyone who owns the land. For my portion it only had the wills from my father and my grandmother, which was not as complete as some of the other owners, but Purple Land Management stated that I did own the land.
However, the guy from SEP was saying that their lawyer said this wasn’t good enough for them. He was very reasonable over the phone and said that he had already invested a lot of money in determining my land ownership. He offered to pay $5,000 to me for any lawyer I hired to verify that I owned the land.
I told the guy that I had a bunch of documents already and that I would call our probate attorney to demonstrate the ownership, thinking this would not be a huge deal. The same probate actions had already transferred several other active leases where I clearly had ownership and received regular royalty checks.
My probate attorney unfortunately had retired at this point though. His firm connected me to another attorney who had worked on my file at the time, but he told me they would just have to outsource the work and alluded to some pretty high estimates for the cost.
I’m not sure what I should be doing at this point and I need to enforce this lease. Is anyone familiar with a situation like this? Can a company that signed a lease with you just say we aren’t sure like this and refuse to pay?