basin/danielle for oil & gas
built on the Danielle Harness →
Basin.

Oil & gas eDiscovery,
production-scale.

Ingest the production. Classify every document, privilege-screen it, surface the hot docs, track the custodians — for royalty class actions, lease and JOA disputes, environmental tort, regulatory enforcement, and M&A title diligence.

production reviewprivilege screeninghot-doc surfacingcustodian trackingv2.0
Pilot a matterRead the harness brief →
01/oil & gas eDiscovery

One production. Every document classified, screened, and ranked.

A royalty class action or a major lease dispute lands a production of a million-plus documents across hundreds of custodians. Basin ingests it once and runs the whole first pass — classification, privilege, hot docs, custodians — against the indexed set.

4:24-cv-02817 / APEX-PROD-004 / doc_APEX-0418332.review+1 hot −1 privilege re-screened
01
01
> production · APEX-PROD-004 · 1,284,907 docs · custodians: 214
02
02
> matter · royalty class action · Landry v. Apex Energy · 4:24-cv-02817
03
03
> doc · APEX-0418332 · scanned memo · 1987-06-11 · handwritten margin notes
·
04
+
+ classify division-order correspondence · responsive · custodian: J. Reyes (Land)
·
05
+
+ ocr scanned + handwriting read · "do NOT net the gathering fee — see Landry"
04
·
- privilege initial tag: PRIVILEGED (atty: R. Vance cc:) · WITHHELD
·
06
+
+ privilege re-screen: business advice, not legal · NOT privileged · log entry void
·
07
+
+ hot.doc contradicts answer ¶14 · deduction known unauthorized · 1987
05
08
> thread · 6 near-dupes across 3 custodians · 1 family w/ withheld parent
·
09
+
+ clawback 1 inadvertent production flagged · holdback list updated
ruleCLASSIFY + PRIVILEGE · 1,284,907 docs · 214 custodians · indexed once
screenprivilege.overclaim · 1 fired · re-screened, cited
audittrace.v2 · 2026-05-28T08:47Z · matter 4:24-cv-02817
Production review

Classify every document by type, responsiveness, and issue. Thread near-duplicates and families. The first pass a contract review team would take weeks on, done in a single pass.

Privilege screening

Draft the privilege log, catch over-claims and business advice dressed as legal, and manage clawback and holdback. Every call cited to the document it came from.

Hot-doc surfacing

Surface the documents that move the matter — the ones that contradict the pleadings or admit the deduction — and tie each to the issue and the custodian who held it.

Custodian tracking

Map documents to custodians and roles across decades of personnel. Know whose files a hot document came from before the deposition, not after.

citedprivilege re-screenedaudit-ready
02/where it runs

The matters that produce at scale.

Oil & gas litigation generates enormous productions because the operative facts are decades old and spread across leasing, operations, accounting, and the regulators. Basin is built for the document load each of these carries.

royalty class actions
Royalty class actions

Statewide royalty-owner classes alleging underpayment and unauthorized deductions. Millions of run statements and division-order files against the leases that govern them.

lease & joa disputes
Lease & JOA disputes

Continuous-development, Pugh, and depth-clause fights between working-interest owners. Decades of operations files, AFEs, and elections in the production.

environmental tort
Environmental tort

Contamination, induced-seismicity, and surface-use claims. Permits, monitoring data, and field correspondence going back to operations no one alive ran.

regulatory enforcement
Regulatory enforcement

State-commission and agency actions on production reporting, spacing, and plugging. Filings cross-referenced against the operator's own internal record.

m&a & title diligence
M&A & title diligence

Pre-acquisition review of producing properties at production scale. Title, leases, and obligations read across the seller's entire document room, not a sample.

old, scanned, handwritten
Old, scanned, handwritten

The operative document is a 1962 lease, a faxed 1991 amendment, or a handwritten margin note on a division order. Basin reads the corpus as it actually exists.

03/why it's hard

Twenty years of run statements. Forty thousand pages. Three sentences that matter.

An energy matter starts with a 1962 lease, a 1978 amendment, a 1994 farmout, and a 2009 assignment of overriding royalty — much of it scanned, faxed, or handwritten. The argument lives in three sentences scattered across that corpus. A partner who knows where to look bills it out at $1,200 an hour. There aren't many of those partners left.

40+ yrs
typical document timeline · per matter
1.2M docs
single major lease dispute
180+ custodians
single major M&A diligence
$1,200/hr
specialist partner rate · vanishing supply
05/native handling

The documents the matter turns on.

Once the production is reviewed, the technical documents need a specialist's read. The harness knows the shapes — leases, division orders, run statements, AFEs, AORIs — and reads them in the context the practice area requires, scanned and handwritten originals included. The original production document is never re-rendered or flattened; every classification, privilege call, and finding cites the exact source document and bates page.

cited to bates page
leases & assignments
Leases & assignments

Parse habendum, Pugh, depth, shut-in royalty, and surface-use clauses. Walk the chain from original mineral grant through every assignment.

division orders
Division orders

Reconcile decimal interests across operators, NRIs, ORRIs, NPRIs. Flag stipulations that conflict with the underlying lease.

run statements
Run statements

Read monthly production volumes, posted prices, deductions. Surface underpayments at the line-item level across hundreds of months.

afes & joa elections
AFEs & JOA elections

Track every Authority For Expenditure, election deadline, non-consent invocation, and the penalties that followed.

title opinions
Title opinions

Cross-check the opinion against the underlying recorded documents. Flag stipulations the title attorney noted but the operator never cured.

regulatory filings
Regulatory filings

Track Form filings across the state commissions (TX RRC, OK OCC, NM OCD, ND IC). Cross-reference reported production against severance tax filings.

06/deep application · royalty reconciliation

Read the run statement against the lease.

The deepest read the same engine runs — the reconciliation a royalty class action lives or dies on, line by line.

ROY-2024-118 / well_Smith-Unit-3 / run-statement_2023-08.audit+3 add −2 flagged
01
01
> well · Smith Unit #3 · API 42-503-32145 · operator: Apex Energy
02
02
> lease · vol 1842 / pg 374 · 1/4 royalty · no post-production deduction
03
03
> month · 2023-08 · gas volume 12,847 MMBtu · oil 412 bbl
04
04
> run statement · posted price $2.41/MMBtu · $84.12/bbl
05
·
- royalty owed (lease basis) · $7,743.78 (1/4 of 12,847 × $2.41 + 412 × $84.12)
06
·
- royalty paid (operator) ··············· $6,891.04
·
05
+
+ discrepancy ······························ $852.74 (underpayment 11.0%)
·
06
+
+ root.cause gathering fee deduction · NOT AUTHORIZED by §3.4 of lease
07
07
> cite ····· vol 1842 / pg 374 / ¶3.4 "Lessee shall bear all costs..."
·
08
+
+ argument Heritage Resources v. NationsBank (Tex. 1996) · post-production
ruleROYALTY_AUDIT · cited 1 clause · match: high
screendeduction.unauthorized · 1 fired · flagged for argument
audittrace.v2 · 2026-05-28T09:14Z · matter ROY-2024-118

A typical underpayment is 8–15% per well per month across a 200-well unit over 60 months. Basin reads every run statement against the underlying lease automatically and surfaces the deductions the operator wasn't entitled to take — cited to the clause that prohibits them.

citedunderpayment flaggedaudit-ready
07/who uses this
plaintiff & defense
Energy litigators

Plaintiff and defense firms running productions in royalty class actions, lease and JOA disputes, environmental tort, and enforcement. They put Basin on the first pass — classification, privilege, hot docs — then take it deep on the technical documents the matter turns on.

operators & in-house
E&P operations + M&A

Producers running pre-acquisition title diligence across a seller's full document room. In-house counsel reconciling royalty payments before a landowner audit. Land departments tracking expirations across thousands of leases.

Pilot a matter.

Send us a production from a closed matter or one of your current ones. We'll run Basin on it end-to-end — classification, privilege, hot docs, the technical read — and you see the findings line by line on real work before you commit.

team@danielle.legal