OIL LEASE UPDATE

Jim sent me a couple messages on Facebook today. Here they are and my response to them:

I have communicated with the Kentucky attorney this morning. He is going to make some final suggestions on the lease and send to me, hopefully by the end of next week. After that, I intend to take his suggestions and send a counter offer to the company.

As I have previously explained, I cannot represent anyone else on this. However, I am happy to include you on communications I have with the oil company so that you can request whatever changes on your own that you want to be made on your behalf as the process goes forward. In order to do that, I would need a written acknowledgment from each of you that your understand that I am not representing you, and that you are not relying on any advice that I have provided. I know you may think I am being paranoid about this, but this is something I need to do professionally to protect myself.

I will be in touch. In the meantime, let me know if you have any questions.

PS -- as part of all this, you may very well want to retain your own attorney and obtain advice on this. The relationship with the KY attorney is strictly between me and him. I would encourage each of you to seek individual legal guidance and advice from a knowledgeable attorney who practices in this area. That attorney could either by the attorney I have been dealing with, or someone else who he might be able to recommend. There is some minor expense involved in retaining an attorney for this purpose, but obviously I believe it is worth spending some money at this point to help make an informed decision.

PSS -- if you want to use the same attorney I am using, it may be that we can share in the expense I have incurred thus far, which is under $1K. You would need to contact him directly and see what sort of arrangement can be worked out between each of you and him, individually. If you want to do that, let me know and I will send his contact info and let him know that you will be contacting him. Thanks.

Hey Jim,

Thanks for letting me know what's going on. i absolutely understand and can appreciate you having to protect yourself professionally.

I will need to pass this information on to my clan and see what they want to do; my feeling is we will probably want to use the same attorney and therefore we can all share expenses (and let's face it, there's nine in my family - that's got to help). If we could do that, it would probably be the most beneficial to all of us. That's my thinking, but I will need to wait and see what the rest say. If you want to go ahead and forward the attorney's information to me, that would be fine.

Mark and I have still not received our letters from the oil company. Do you have the contact information so I can call and get those out to us?

Also, do you have a time frame of when you will be proceeding with your offer to the oil company? If we all were to use the same attorney and, therefore make the same counteroffer to the oil company, we may want to think about doing it in the same time period. Would you agree?

As far as written acknowledgments from each of us, that should not be a problem. I am wondering if you would accept an email stating that from each of us instead?

Thanks again for the information. I'll let you know what we've decided and I'll look forward to hearing from you.

So, what say you all? First let me tell you that both of Jim's brothers and Mabel Kirk's daughter in law were included in these messages so there would be at least 13 people involved in this counteroffer...and probably more. I think that might be good if we could all use the same attorney and have to pay less for his advice. Less than $100 bucks apiece maybe.

My thinking on this is I doubt Jim would pay $1000 to a fellow attorney to get back a couple hundred, so it might be a good (and feasible) counteroffer he has in mind.

Let me know what you each think we should do on this. I will call Pete, Mike and Rick and let them know about this. I'll let you know what they say.