The Real Cost of Remote-Only Work for Early-Career Landmen

We work inside courthouses, BLM offices, and state land offices on a recurring basis. Every week, we cross paths with people doing similar work: abstractors, in-house landmen, contract landmen, brokers' field people, attorneys reviewing files. Increasingly, the early-career people we meet aren't physically there. They've been with their brokerage or operator for a year or two, and they've done most of their work from home, often without ever meeting their project manager in person.

That shift has us thinking carefully about how we develop relationships with the next generation of landmen. The work itself has stayed deeply relational, regardless of where the desk happens to sit.

The Way Landmen Used to Come Up

The traditional path put new landmen in the field from day one. A new contractor drove out to a courthouse they'd never seen, paired with someone who had a few years more experience, and figured it out as they went. They sat in landowners' living rooms negotiating leases. They met the brokers and field landmen who would later route them work, and they ran into the same people repeatedly at courthouses, at industry meetings, and at the local AAPL chapter.

The infrastructure assumed that landmen learn from being around other landmen. That assumption was correct.

Some of the larger brokerages put real structure around the path. They held landman schools where new contractors learned the basics together. They threw Christmas parties for everyone who'd worked for the firm during the year, so people who'd never met because they lived hundreds of miles apart still saw each other once a year.

The infrastructure assumed that landmen learn from being around other landmen. That assumption was correct.

What Remote-Only Changes

A landman whose entire first two years happen on a screen lives in a very different professional environment. The work itself looks similar. They receive runsheet packages, build ownership reports, communicate with project managers, and log their hours. 

The surroundings are gone, though. 

They don't see the courthouse staff or learn how those staff members prefer to be approached. They don't watch a senior landman handle a tough conversation with a landowner. They don't sit at a NAPE booth or a chapter lunch listening to people two desks over swap notes about a basin they're about to start working in.

The clearest signal we've heard about this comes from project managers themselves. We've talked to several who have contractors they've worked with for two years without ever meeting them in person, sometimes without even a regular Zoom call. The relationship exists entirely in writing.

For experienced landmen who already came up the old way, that arrangement can work. The reps already have judgment, relationships, and a network they built when the field still required showing up. They know what they don't know, and they know who to call. 

For somebody trying to build all three of those things from scratch, the remote-only environment is fundamentally limiting.

Interpersonal Skill Is the Work

Landmen earn their living through relationships: with landowners, with courthouse staff, with abstractors, with peers, with brokers who route them work, with operators who hire them on. We treat the interpersonal craft of those relationships as part of the technical work, not as a separate skill stacked on top of it.

We've found those judgments transfer best in person, with a senior team member close enough to talk through what just happened.

Professional judgments like reading a landowner's hesitation, knowing when a phone call beats an email, or sensing when a courthouse staff member wants a different approach. They come from watching how veterans handle a difficult conversation, hearing the story of a deal that almost went sideways, and seeing how a peer-level network actually operates over time. We've found those judgments transfer best in person, with a senior team member close enough to talk through what just happened.

The Mentorship Gap

Sink-or-swim training has always been part of how landmen come up. The phrase implies a hard learning curve. It also implies someone watching the swimmer: a senior landman who corrects a mistake the same day, a peer who flags a quirk in the chain of title a junior would otherwise miss, a broker who hears a story about a difficult landowner over coffee and tells the new contractor exactly what to try next time.

When training compresses to written instructions and occasional check-ins, the feedback loop slows down and the texture of the lesson disappears.

When training compresses to written instructions and occasional check-ins, the feedback loop slows down and the texture of the lesson disappears. A senior landman who would have explained a mistake over a courthouse table now sends a Slack message instead. A near-miss on a chain of title shows up in a thread, and most of the team never sees it. 

Our Approach

We built our team around the assumption that members learn this work best in proximity. Our team is in the BLM office and state land office on a weekly basis. They learn by watching, absorbing corrections in real time, and handling the same files multiple times until the patterns become familiar.

By the time the internship ends, the student has worked actual files, talked to actual BLM and SLO staff, and absorbed the kind of contextual knowledge that takes most professionals years to assemble through reading.

Our internship program extends that approach to people who haven't entered the industry yet. A third-year energy commerce student spends an entire summer with us, producing real abstracts and runsheets while a senior team member sits a desk away. By the time the internship ends, the student has worked actual files, talked to actual BLM and SLO staff, and absorbed the kind of contextual knowledge that takes most professionals years to assemble through reading.

Remote work is part of how the industry operates now, and it's changed how we think about developing the next generation of our own team. 

We've designed our team and our internship program around the idea that the most important parts of this work transmit through proximity: time alongside senior people, relationships with the BLM and SLO staff who maintain the records, hands on real files. That's the bench we're building, and it's the kind of expertise we bring to every project we take on.

Abstracting is all we do, across state and federal records in New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Texas. If you're working through a project that needs in-the-records expertise, we're easy to reach.