Jacquelyn “Jackie” MacAfee

Jacquelyn “Jackie” MacAfee handles title examination and due diligence for oil and gas operators. A former landman, she knows what lands on an in-house landman’s desk and writes opinions that answer the questions those landmen are really asking. Clients bring her in when ownership gets complicated and they need a straight answer, delivered short and to the point.

Title Opinions

Most of Jackie’s practice is title opinions – having authored and reviewed hundreds of opinions over her career – and the larger the ownership picture, the more she’s in her element. In the Permian Basin, a single opinion can mean chaining title through well over a thousand instruments and tracking a couple hundred owners at a time, with drilling and division order decisions riding on every decimal. She’s at home in the numbers, building the ownership schedules that turn a heavily subdivided tract into a result an operator can drill on. With the law on non-participating royalty interests shifting over the past decade, she also works through the fixed versus floating NPRI and double fraction questions that decide who gets paid.

Depth Severances, Allocation Wells, and Long-Term Lease Holding

Operators bring Jackie the questions that decide how a lease gets developed: what they can drill, what they have to drill, and what they’re holding. On tracts covered by anywhere from one lease to hundreds, with pooled units and allocation wells in the mix, she works through each lease’s severance and retained acreage language and maps out the development needed to hold the acreage, drawing on her own experience permitting allocation wells with the Texas Railroad Commission. She looks well past the next well, because depth severances agreed to without a long-term plan can cost an operator acreage years down the road.

Contractual Rights, Legacy Agreements, and Federal and State Lease Title

Some of the most involved title work turns on contractual rights, not just the record chain. On federal and state acreage, older leases often lack the severances found in modern forms, so ownership is frequently defined by legacy agreements like JOAs and carried through every instrument that follows. Jackie traces those rights from their origin to the present and reconciles contract and record title, so operators know exactly what they hold.

Landman Experience Behind Practical, Operator-Focused Opinions

Jackie started as an independent landman in West Texas courthouses, then moved in-house as a landman with EP Energy E&P Company, where her work included Utah’s Uinta Basin. She knows how a well gets permitted and developed, how an in-house land department is structured, and how much lands on a landman’s desk on any given day. That’s why her opinions are built around the practical questions landmen face, and why follow-up questions get a quick answer once a well comes online and royalty owners start calling. She grew up in the oil and gas industry and now lives in Kingwood with her husband and three children, where she’s an active member of the PTA.