The Lone Star State’s size is usually a plus. In recent years, it has meant a laundry list of shale plays and a wide selection of strong college football programs. But that size is a burden for those hungry for oil and gas ownership data.

Few counties digitize their land records immediately, which means budgeting and waiting for landmen to trek out to remote courthouses and retrieve new records or relying on outdated data from current providers.

Digital Abstract & Title, an oil and gas tech startup from the Texas Panhandle, started as a title plant for a handful of local counties, but it’s changing the game with a subscription-based platform called Blackacre that rolled out Texas-wide in November 2014.

Creating this service has been exhausting in capital and workforce demands, but the technology piece has been by far the most difficult, which is why no one has rolled out such a system before. Blackacre’s online platform allows a user to search geographically indexed records on virtually any device connected to the Internet.

A team of full-time employees is making a circuit in Texas’ top 100 oil-producing counties each week, ensuring every bit of new data is loaded into Blackacre’s platform.

People and companies interested in these data include:

  • Oil and gas companies updating their existing paper abstracts;
  • Brokers looking for recent oil and gas leases to know what is not available to lease and to see where competitors are going;
  • Landmen looking for oil and gas releases to find open production and lease it before competitors find it;
  • Investment groups looking for mineral ownership transactions to find new owners interested in selling their minerals for a lump sum instead of monthly cash lease payments in the future; and
  • Anyone negotiating royalties on mineral rights contracts to see what competitors are offering in that area.

Geographic indexing

Of course, not all data are created equal. County land records are generally not geographically searchable, and searching by name and date is far less helpful than tracking by a specific legal description. In layman’s terms, clients are usually interested in a specific section of land—a specific plot—and only Blackacre allows them to search by section.

That’s because Texas is notoriously difficult to index. By Texas law, courthouses are not required to index the legal description of documents filed, though one document can reference another with a legal description or it can reference a document that references a document with a legal description, and that chain gets deeper and deeper over time. For more than 100 years, abstract companies have stepped in with methods that have changed little despite the advent of computers and the Internet.

Digital Abstract cut its teeth by digitizing the land records of five counties in the Panhandle back to sovereignty and indexing them geographically. That task took dozens of indexers working around the clock for 18 months. Although Digital Abstract dominates the title and abstract business in those Panhandle counties, a bigger realization came to light. No one else Texas-wide was responding to the need to quickly digitize records and make them geographically searchable.

Oil, gas leasing background

If someone wants to know about a specific piece of land, he or she can see the original oil and gas lease document with a legal description. But as it is passed around, dozens or hundreds of other documents can reference that oil and gas lease document—including the release—and none of them are specifically named in the legal description. Instead, these dozens, hundreds or thousands of documents may only reference a previous document.

From a technology standpoint, that’s a nightmare, but Digital Abstract developed cutting-edge computer code to connect these documents together like a spider web. Clients need proof of every change that happened to that section, but they are really hunting for the original lease and the release. Blackacre shows the lease and, with a click, hides everything that happened between the lease and release. If the clients have been using paper, a week’s worth of work happens instantly.

Even the very best servers kept running out of memory with instruments with thousands of referencing documents, so major resources went into developing code to simplify the process enough to make the technology functional.

Royalty data covered

The original focus was on data that could be used to track ownership, but royalty data also are being digitized in a novel way. Finding information about royalties on one specific lease is easy, but aggregating royalty information across entire oil plays is entirely new.

With Blackacre, anyone considering mineral rights contracts can see at a glance how much it would cost to get into a play. Access to that information means a more informed decision when negotiating royalties.

Track trends from anywhere, anytime

With the current antiquated system of data retrieval, all mineral rights data must be specifically sought out based on hunches or specific interest, and they were never searchable Texas-wide by section. With Blackacre, trends can emerge based on fresh data, even if the subscriber is not necessarily interested in that particular area. Reports alert subscribers of any new activity in the area they specify in real time.

To get that same information, companies would have to pay someone to go to 100 courthouses every week, and they would need to have a geographic search tool in place. Blackacre subscribers can access these data at any time.

Big bet by investors

Doing something that no one else is doing, especially in a mature industry like the oil and gas space, involves a leap of faith. But Digital Abstract’s investors are a collection of lawyers and oil men whose professional lives have all centered around Texas’ oil and gas industry. The goal was to create the tools this industry has been missing.

While it’s true that every piece of data in this system came from a document publicly available for free at the courthouse, Digital Abstract has turned public data into searchable, deeply indexed data. The Blackacre platform delivers and displays the information in a way people can build entire businesses on top of.

The attorneys at Fish & Richardson have filed patent applications for Digital Abstract & Title to protect Blackacre’s data structure display mechanisms.

With the continuing need for data, Digital Abstract will continue to add counties in Texas and expand its data collection into other states.