Labor Day 2025 marked the eighth anniversary of Alterman Law Group’s opening for business, continuing the real estate and private business practice that Dean Alterman started in 2006 as Alterman Law Office. In our eight years as Alterman Law Group we are proud to have advised and represented more than 1000 clients on matters that span a range from homes to hotels and from factories to ballfields, and we look forward to continuing our growth in Year Nine.
The program at the 2025 annual meeting and conference of the Real Estate and Land Use section of the Oregon State Bar, known fondly to lawyers in the field as RELU, includes a presentation by Dean Alterman on landlocked parcels. A parcel might be legally landlocked because, like the parcel in the illustration, it does not front on a public road and has no legal access to a public road. It might be factually landlocked because even though it fronts on a public road, a river or chasm might cut most of the parcel off from the public road. Or it might be legally but not factually landlocked: what if a private road runs through the parcel, but the owner of the parcel doesn’t have the legal right to use the road? Dean’s presentation covers how lawyers can advise clients in any of these three unfortunate situations, interspersed with discussions of the rights and obligations of adjoining landowners, set off by quotations from Robert Frost. Who has the right to use old private roads if, as Frost wrote in Mending Wall, “no one has seen them made or heard them made”? Dean will answer that question, and others, on August 23 at RELU.
My colleagues know my feelings about using the passive voice to describe the parties’ obligations in a contract. It’s fine, in elegant literature or in a revolutionary tract, to describe what is to be done. A contract should state who is promising to do something. A lease that states only that “Rent will be paid on the first day of the month and is delinquent if not received by the 10th day of the month” hasn’t imposed an obligation on the tenant to pay rent to the landlord.
Don’t be elegant; be exact.