Legal Question in Real Estate Law in Louisiana

Re: Legal property description

Hire a surveyor to survey the property and that will solve your problem.

Re: Legal property description

A California lawyer (such as myself) should not be second-guessing an LA lawyer on laws as different from every other state's as Louisiana's French-based system. However, I can't resist wondering if a survey is the right approach. Surveyors cannot survey "the property" unless they know where it is. In other words, surveyors start with the deed and then go out and put stakes in the ground to show in the real world what the deed describes. They can also do the reverse - write up a "legal" description of something existing in the real world. such as a driveway or an enclosed field or the railroad from A to B, but such a description has little or no legal use or validity to establish ownership.

Instead, maybe it would be more useful to have a title search done of the parish records, to see if older deeds to the same property contained a more complete description. It's rather likely that someone copying the legal description from an older deed to a newer one has left out a clause, line or sentence. If so, then a simple action to correct the error could presumably be brought in a local court. In a common-law state such as the other 49, this would be an action to "reform" an instrument, i.e., to correct the faulty deed, but under Louisiana's civil law system, it probably has another name.