Coleman G. Anglin

Coleman G. Anglin is an oil and gas title lawyer. For two decades he has examined title, run acquisition due diligence, and untangled ownership across most of the major U.S. shale plays, starting at the courthouse as an abstractor in the Barnett. Operators, asset owners, and mineral buyers bring him the questions with no obvious answer: instruments that reasonable people read differently, deals with no roadmap, and sprawling projects that need triage. He works through large volumes of information quickly, sees the big picture in view, and tells clients plainly where their time and money will matter most.

Second opinions on ambiguous instruments and novel transactions

In-house land and legal teams often call Coleman in as the tiebreaker: a conveyance or reservation that reasonable people read differently, or a broker’s abstract that points one way while the client’s instincts point another. He works through both readings, explains why each side might be right, and lands on the interpretation that will hold, with a long-standing focus on NPRIs and participating royalty interests. When a client knows the goal but not the instrument or the steps to get there, he maps the most direct path. When a counterparty cannot follow the ownership picture, he gives the client plain language to explain who owns what and why.

Title examination with an abstractor’s instincts

Coleman’s first job in this business was building abstracts in the Barnett Shale, which is a polite way of saying he read other people’s mistakes before he had a license to opine on them. He knows how records vary from county to county and where things tend to go missing. When a chain has a gap, he usually has a good idea where the missing link is, and when the record cannot prove it, his curative reflects what most likely happened. He brings the same discipline to the Permian, where depth severances, acreage severances, and termination provisions turn a single tract into stacked, three-dimensional slices of ownership. Thinking in three dimensions is not just for geologists, and keeping each slice distinct is what separates a clean ownership schedule from an expensive mistake.

Large-scale A&D due diligence triaged to deal value

Coleman has overseen title due diligence on acquisitions exceeding $1 billion and coordinated projects spanning hundreds of tracts on 30-, 60-, and 90-day windows. At that scale, he works with buy-side and sell-side clients up front to set defect thresholds under the PSA, spot the issues likely to repeat across the portfolio, and focus the review where it moves the purchase price.

Findings go out as they surface, so nothing lands as a surprise the day before a deadline. His benchmark is simple: the defects found should be worth more than the legal bill. For cost-sensitive mineral buyers, that often means scoping something leaner than a full title opinion.

Multi-state counsel across ten jurisdictions and two legal systems

Coleman is licensed in ten states, including Louisiana, whose civil law treats mineral rights in fundamentally different terms. Ten licenses come with ten sets of bar dues and ten different answers to the same question. He has learned how each jurisdiction handles life estates, executive rights, and the other recurring questions of mineral ownership, measured each against Texas law, and come away with a comparative grasp of the subject that pays off for clients: when an operator’s next project moves from New Mexico to Oklahoma or Appalachia, the same lawyer moves with it. He has run title teams in both the Mid-Continent and the Marcellus and knows the players, practices, and title culture in each.