TitleDesk Agentby The Harness Lab
What landman software has to do — and what most of it skips
Land teams already run on data platforms, systems of record, a general AI assistant and an automation tool. Each does its job. None of them executes an assignment: read the instruments, put them in order, work the fractions, list the defects, file the package. That mechanical middle is still done by hand on a landman's desk. TitleDesk was built for exactly that middle.
How TitleDesk handles a title assignment
1. Take the assignment as data
Paste the assignment letter the client sent. TitleDesk reads it as data — never as instructions — extracts the requirements (county, abstract or survey, source deed, lessors to verify, acreage, budget), tells you plainly what it can and cannot do, and writes a two-column plan: its work and yours, running at the same time. Anything moved to your column is marked manual and is never touched automatically.
2. Read the documents locally
Scanned county records are OCR'd on the laptop with Tesseract. There is no OCR API, no internet dependency and no per-page cloud charge. Multi-page instruments are processed page by page; a page OCR cannot read is marked needs your eyes rather than recorded as blank. Twenty-three instrument types are classified and filed by your naming conventions. More on local OCR.
3. Build the work product
- Runsheet — recorded instruments in chronological order with grantor, grantee, volume and page, instrument number and interest, each row linked to the page it was read from. Chain gaps are flagged, not hidden. Runsheet details.
- Ownership by tract — mineral and leasehold interests as exact BigInt fractions, so 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 is exactly 1 and an over-conveyance is reported as an exact excess. Net mineral acres, leasehold and held-by-production included.
- Curative and issues — unleased interests, unreleased prior liens and leases, probate and heirship gaps, assignment-chain defects, each with the document and page it came from and a proposed next step.
- Wells, leases and production — Texas RRC data imported and matched to wells and leases with canonical API identity.
4. Deliver in the client's format
Reports are written into your company's own Excel template, column names matched by meaning, never overwriting a row a person corrected. Ten report types in Word, Excel, PDF or CSV. The submission package is the folder tree you actually turn in, every document filed where the client expects it, originals copied and never moved. If a report would ship empty, the build says so.
5. Verify before anything leaves
Before a package is written, TitleDesk re-derives its own conclusion: every runsheet citation must resolve to an index row it actually captured, every source deed the assignment named must have been examined, and the package files must match their recorded hashes. A run that fails a check stops and says why, instead of shipping something that merely looks finished.
Why landmen choose desktop software over a cloud portal
| Concern | TitleDesk |
|---|---|
| Client documents leaving the building | Local by default. OCR, extraction, arithmetic and report generation run on your computer. Selected content leaves only when you deliberately use a connected AI, personal Drive, approved connector or research source. |
| Working from a courthouse basement | Activates online, then works offline for an extended period. |
| AI you did not ask for | Fully functional with no AI connected. When you connect one, it is your own account — Claude, OpenAI, Moonshot, a local Ollama model or a custom endpoint — and a model can only add to what the deterministic parser found; it can never delete a requirement or overrule a person. |
| Auditability | An append-only audit log records every consequential action, including by the software itself. |
| Your shop's format | Customization Lab: describe the workflow in plain English; TitleDesk proposes a validated company profile that a person approves before it applies. |
Who it is for
Independent landmen running their own assignments, land departments that need repeatable output across every landman, and title shops delivering to clients with fixed deliverable formats. Solo seats and enterprise workspaces are both offered — see pricing.
On real assignments completed by working landmen, TitleDesk's automated run takes about twenty minutes for work that takes a landman three to five days; the landman then reviews and certifies. Packets, county sources and scan quality move the figure, so the ROI page shows every assumption, and we will help you qualify it on one of your own assignments. Download v0.2.5 or talk to Spencer.