Southern Illinois Business Law
Marion Business Law Firm
Whether you are in the early stages of starting a business of your own, or you’ve invested your life in building a successful venture, you have a lot of hopes — and often money — at stake.
A successful business is hard work, but getting good legal advice to help you make decisions, minimize risk and protect your finances need not be difficult. It’s as easy as contacting Lawler Brown.
We Can Assist Your Business
Lawler Brown is a law firm that many southern Illinois area businesses and entrepreneurs rely on when they need legal advice, transactional services, and business contracts in a timely and reliable method.
Comprehensive Services
Lawler Brown provides comprehensive business law services including:
- Starting a business and choosing a business entity
- Buying or selling a business
- Drafting and due diligence review of business contracts
- General legal counsel services for ongoing legal advice from a law firm that understands your particular business and your goals
- Commercial real estate leasing, purchase agreements, including services for business owners and builders
- Business litigation for any type of business dispute, including employment disputes, breach of contract, fraudulent business practices, unfair competition, and partnership and shareholders disputes/li>
- Business succession planning to ensure the smooth transfer of ownership and management within a business
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Mineral Rights in Oil and Gas: What You Need to Know
The traditional conception of real property ownership was that a landowner owned his plot of land along with a column of dirt down to the center of the earth and a column of air up to the sky. This conception no longer holds true. It is now common, especially in Southern Illinois, that when one purchases a piece of real property, the purchaser obtains title to the surface of the land, but not the column of dirt beneath it. Very often, the mineral rights to a piece of property have been severed, and the owner of the mineral rights has the authority to mine them. When mineral rights are severed in the conveyance of a piece of property, the severance creates two distinct and separate interests in the land—a surface estate and a mineral estate, either of which can be conveyed, devised, or leased. When this occurs, the owner of the surface estate is subservient to the owner of the mineral estate. This means that he may not interfere with the activities reasonably necessary to extract the minerals from underneath his land. While title to metallic minerals vests2 at the time of conveyance, title to oil and gas does not, due to the tendency of these types of minerals to move around under the earth. Rather, mineral rights in oil and gas do not vest until they are actually discovered. Thus, mineral rights to oil and gas are better conceived of as rights to exploration and, very often, they are mined pursuant to a mineral lease rather than outright ownership. These leases are subject to the same rules as...
When Can Your Neighbors Legally Take Your Land?
When Can Your Neighbors Legally Take Your Land? There is a concept in real estate law that is little known outside the legal world, whereby a trespasser can gain legal title to someone else’s land. The “trespasser” in these cases is usually a neighbor but, nonetheless, someone who does not own your property can become the legal owner by his use of it through a concept known as adverse possession. Claims of adverse possession are creatures of common law in Illinois, and require a showing of several elements. In order to legally take title to land, a person’s use and possession of the land must be: Hostile (against the right of the true owner and without permission) Actual (he or she exercises physical control over the property) Exclusive (In the possession of the trespasser alone and no one else) Open and notorious (the trespasser must use the property as the true owner would without hiding the occupancy) Continuous for a period of 20 years Adverse possession claims are especially common in rural areas (like most of Southern Illinois) as opposed to towns and cities because it is often more difficult to determine where one piece of property ends and another begins. Example of Adverse Possession Let’s take a look at how a hypothetical adverse possession case might play out. Assume there are two property owners—the Smiths and the Joneses—who own neighboring farms. Mr. Smith erects a barn that he believes is on his property, but is actually 15 feet over the property line on the Jones’s farm. Mr. Jones says nothing about this, and Mr. Smith uses this barn as...