Easement extraction, with the honesty the documents require

What an easement instrument actually contains

A recorded easement is a grant of rights, and only sometimes a shape. Read a stack of them, as we did to qualify the document class, and the pattern is stark: the granting clause points at an attached exhibit with no courses in the text; or a width is stated but the centerline follows "facilities established by the Grantee", equipment that may not exist yet; or the grant blankets the whole described property with no width anywhere. The encumbrance is real in every case. A drawable boundary exists in few of them.

That is why easement work resists deed plotting tools. They treat the instrument as a container of courses, and when the courses are absent, the tool either refuses entirely or, worse, draws something. An easement plotted where the instrument never put one misleads everyone downstream who trusts the map.

Extraction the burden actually needs

Easting reads the instrument itself, scan included, and extracts the burden as data: the easement type, the width where the document states one, the term, exclusivity, the rights granted, and the parcel encumbered. Every one of those answers carries the verbatim sentence it came from, so a reviewer checks the claim against the instrument in seconds. That is the layer rights assembly runs on, and it exists whether or not the easement can be drawn.

Where the instrument does carry courses, the geometry gets the same treatment as a deed: the traverse is recomputed deterministically, closure is checked, and stated area is corroborated independently, down to square-foot verification for small easements, before anything reaches the map. A 200-square-foot well site verifies as exactly that. And where the instrument cannot locate itself, the result says which of the cases it hit, in plain language, with the burden still extracted and recorded. The GroundTruth verdict treats "this easement's area lives on an attached exhibit" as a finding worth filing, because it is.

Who this is for

Teams assembling rights across many parcels: energy and infrastructure land teams, the land-services firms they hire, ROW groups, and the county and title offices that inherit the paperwork. If that is your work, the land teams page covers the workflow end to end, including project pricing and what the qualification corpus looked like. For occasional easement work, the same account and the same $30 document pack that cover deeds cover easements, in the browser or in QGIS.

The current state of the field, plainly

We checked every AI deed tool we could find against this document class in August 2026. None extracts the burden. The closest, a credit-priced web plotter, traverses easement centerlines as open geometry, which is real progress on the drawing half and silent on the rights half. The rest mention easements as one more source of text to plot. Verification of what was extracted, against what the instrument itself states, is not offered anywhere else at all. We keep the receipts for those claims and update them when the field moves; if you find a tool that does more, we want to know about it.

Try it on a real instrument

Three documents are free, with no card, and an extraction that fails is never billed. Read one in your browser at app.easting.ai with nothing to install, or install the Easting plugin from the QGIS plugin manager, or start with the user guide. Send an awkward instrument on purpose; the awkward ones are what the class was built on.