Office work, held apart from the field
The records in this conversation are produced by people at a desk: the landman, the engineer, the accountant, the paralegal, the attorney. A company’s field headcount is real, and it’s a different number. It doesn’t qualify the records, and it doesn’t disqualify a company that also has a documented office.
Counts as documented desk work
- Attorneys and paralegals
- Landmen and lease analysts
- Engineers, geologists, and technical staff at a desk
- Accountants and division-order analysts
- Support and owner-relations staff
- Administrators who keep the files
- Drilling, completion, and production staff who document the work
- Plant, pipeline, and offshore coordinators at a desk
- Right-of-way agents and acquisition staff
Held apart from that count
- Rig crews and roustabouts
- Pumpers and other field hands
- Offshore crews and vessel hands
- A headcount that’s only field, drilling, or offshore operations
- A client’s field staff, borrowed as if it were the firm’s
Contractors — contract landmen, contract attorneys, outsourced accounting staff — aren’t banned, and they aren’t automatically in. Whether they count depends on the provider and on whether the work is documented as part of the company’s usable history.
The work, not the software login
What can be described is history the company created: customer emails and support threads, spreadsheets, notes in a land system such as iLandman, GIS layers and tract maps the company drew, entries in its accounting software, shared files, project-board updates in Monday.com, team discussions in Slack, and meeting records where recording was permitted. Zendesk and Freshdesk are examples of where a ticket history can sit. A subscription isn’t ownership of everything in the tool. A ticket isn’t automatically eligible, and neither is a licensed base map under a company layer. The same rule covers a drilling report, a well test, a plant work order, a pipeline file, an offshore coordination record, or a right-of-way tracker: it’s in view when the company created it and may discuss it. Third-party tests are excluded. Sensitive personnel, safety, and critical infrastructure details aren’t automatically licensable. Client material, privilege, and confidentiality are still sorted out before anything is in scope.
04
Law firms are in the same pool.
Oil and gas title-opinion firms are the practice Dan knows. Firms in other practice areas may qualify too. A specialist practice isn’t asked to pretend it’s a 200-person operator, and it isn’t waved through because someone likes the work. Smaller specialist law firms may warrant individual review. Fit is confirmed by the provider. This site doesn’t promise that a firm clears a threshold written for a different kind of company, and privilege isn’t waived.
Oil & gas title opinion law firmsWhat a provider still confirms
Providers don’t share one rule. Some look at larger desk teams in the United States or Canada. Some will review a legal practice on its own facts. Some only consider much larger organizations. Publishing a single headcount here would pretend those routes are the same. They aren’t. The provider you reach confirms fit for its own program.
Several years of usable history matter because the value, if any, is in a workflow that has already happened — not in a plan to start keeping records later.
A poor match
- A field operation with no documented office workflow to describe.
- A request to sell minerals, shop a royalty, or market raw seismic.
- Anyone treating this page as an offer, a price, or a payment date.
Take the list into the office.
The checklist is a short readiness pass for the records you already keep. It opens as a PDF, with no email and no form.