The Role of the Surveyor in Land Litigation: Pretrial

The expert in any of a number of technical fields is frequently, as a witness or as an adviser, drawn into the vortex of land litigation. The expert in the land case may be a surveyor, title abstractor, property appraiser, engineer, geologist, hydrologist, oceanographer, biologist, or geographer. But there is one denominator that, in land cases, each of these experts bears in common with the other. It lies in the role each plays in a land dispute, whether it concerns title, political or property boundaries, water rights, or other aspects of natural resource use. In these cases, the expert’s role is much more like the lawyer’s role than is the part of an expert in virtually any other kind of law case.