A while back, I wrote an article about a program developed to assist surveyors with writing legal descriptions. LegalWorks is a program written by Terry Dotson of DotSoft. It’s a great program, easy to use, and pays for itself with the first legal description that you create with it. Well, I received an email recently from Terry letting me know that the program had been updated. It sat in my inbox for a while until I finally got around to updating the program. Now, I’ve been showing this to clients this week, and they’re simply amazed at what the program can do (look for a purchase soon, Terry….) However, I wish I’d had the update earlier this week (I know, I know, I had it, just being a procrastinator.) Here’s why the new version is so cool – click more to find out…

In the early days of LegalWorks (ok, back in September – my, how time flies when you’re having fun) you had a legal description that always went to a point. No real description of said point, just a point. That’s OK, I expect to have to do a little bit of tweaking here and there, even though this thing does an incredible job of writing the legal the exact way I want it to. However, the new version will recognize the description of any point at the vertices of the parcel and bring that description into the legal. Here’s how it works:

I created a roughly rectangular parcel for this demonstration. I then set points at each of the 4 corners. The end result looked a little like this:

So, when I go now and select this polyline for a parcel description, it reads those points as it opens. And here’s the result once the legal is written:

(highlighting mine, not from the program – click on the image to view)

If you’re a registered user of LegalWorks, you should be getting the update as well. If you’re not, what are you waiting for? For the first time ever, legal descriptions are fun!