A question

once.
a few years or so ago in Oxford, Ms when he was stirring the $#!* in the center if section pot dialogue.

He was one of the keynote speakers at the TAPS Conference a year or so ago. He was very passionate about his presentations. As Dan said, very energetic and interesting.

I have sat through one of his lectures...he does a good job. Great that you can get pdu's for Best Business Practices...not in New York, not an acceptable topic.:(

You Cannot Get Credit For "Practice Building"

I believe Best Business Practices falls within Ethics.

Business Law is on many surveying colleges required course list.

Paul in PA

I wish one of you would have said that you learned something!
Instead we get these reports of “passionate and interesting and energetic and informative”. And you got pdh/s for that. And you spent money for that.

I mean I have experienced teachers and instructors like that. They just stirred the pot and they thought they were doing us a service by “making us think”. Like when I sent an employee to the seminar and they came back “twisted”. Things that they had learned properly had to be relearned and sometimes tried out differently (sometimes at great cost to me). I really hope that Jeff Lucas is not this way!

i was in the same seminar as dan. i wouldn't say so much that i learned any facts, but rather was given a new way of looking at the age old problems that confront surveyors on a daily basis. his presentation was well thought out. it was very impassioned. and i think he makes some great points. but in everyday practice it is not as easy as lucas makes it seems to 'do the right thing'. in a perfect world with clients with deep pockets who cared about getting it right lucas' approach would be the gospel. in the real world no client wants a problem. they don't want to pay to have it done right and they don't care about the solution. they want it quick, they want it cheap and they don't want it to affect the ultimate goal they had in mind. a survey is seldom viewed as more than an inconvenience required by a lender or a county official. but that's not jeff's fault. he is doing good things for the profession. i would not call him a snake oil sales man. he gets somethings wrong but all in all he has a good message.

Mr. Luke,
I think it's a good thing to make your students think. I don't think every survey problem and solution is 'cut-and-dried'.

I know Mr. Lucas, like John Stahl, has taught me a lot, and made me realize that there is more to learn.
Tom

Learned something? I always "learn something" at these seminars, some good and some not so good.

Mr. Lucas has an opinion,(a very strong one at that) just like the rest of us. He presented the information in a well thought out manner and brought forth examples of surveys from lawsuits that made me shake my head in shame for what some of our fellow surveyors try to pass off as legitimate work.

I find it hard to believe that a surveyor would "stake the deed" without considering all the available evidence on the ground or that a surveyor would call the occupation "the line" without reading/studying the deed. I learned that many surveyors still work without a contract. I learned many surveyors do not posses the communication skills necessary to convey the results of their work to their client or attorneys.

But most of all, I reaffirmed my long standing belief that this is still a great profession occupied by caring, competent professionals.

At last years Illinois Conference I signed up for a full day session with Mr. Lucas, and quite frankly I could barely make it thru the morning session. At this conference his oratory style was that of a Baptist Minister at a revival meeting. I just couldn’t take all the red faced shouting. He definitely does not need a microphone. It seemed to me that most of his lecture was from an attorney standpoint, not a surveyor. It also seemed to me that he wants us to accept any thing in the ground for a monument just because it’s there, but that’s just my opinion. I bailed out of the afternoon lecture and went to a Gary Kent presentation, in a room adjoining the Lucas lecture. Mr. Kent was interrupted several times by the adjoining lecture and had the whole room “on the count of three” shout out “shut up”. It worked for a few minutes. He is an interesting speaker, if you can take it, but in MHO, don’t take everything he says as gospel – it’s just not how it works around here.

Yes, that Gary Kent seminar was interrupted more than once by Mr. Lucas. He certainly does sound passionate, though!

> Anybody ever attended a seminar by Jeff Lucas?
>

Yes. While I do not agree with Jeff 100% of the time, I always respect his opinions. Have never heard him give a presentation that was not backed by solid research and a thorough knowledge of the subject.

I have been to far too many presentations where people would stand behind the podium and read the power point slides in a monotone. There is no excuse for that.

When in the room next to Jeff I find it best to be as loud and passionate about the subject as he is. In fact, I find that to be good policy whether he is in the next room or not.

Larry P

> I find it hard to believe that a surveyor would "stake the deed" without considering all the available evidence on the ground or that a surveyor would call the occupation "the line" without reading/studying the deed.

There are more deed stakers out there than you care to know. A couple of years ago in a class I was teaching I had an older gentleman tell me that if a deed called for 100.00' between concrete monuments and he found two monuments that were only 99.94' apart, he had to go that extra 0.06 feet because it said so in the deed.

Not sure I ever did convince him that distances in the deed were inferior to the called for monuments. Old habits die hard sometimes.

>I learned that many surveyors still work without a contract.

Written contract. If you work with a client, you have a contract. Too often they are unwritten. That is where the problems start.

>I learned many surveyors do not posses the communication skills necessary to convey the results of their work to their client or attorneys.

Too true. Far too true.

> But most of all, I reaffirmed my long standing belief that this is still a great profession occupied by caring, competent professionals.

Agreed. Gotta love surveying.

Larry P

I have attended several of Mr. Lucas's seminars, and in every one of them I learned some if not many applicable and quite frankly necessary things. I am really looking forward to his two day presentation in March at our ISPLS convention.

Yes, Mr. Lucas is very passionate about what he does and how he teachs it. I just wish the audience (members of my profession) was just as passionate about learning how this great profession SHOULD be practiced as Mr. Lucas is about teaching it. After all, don't we owe to the public and our profession to be as proficient in doing our job, locating the one and only true boundary between two properties, as we can possibly be?

I always hear the comments about how he is wrong on several if not many things, but I've yet to hear any of his positions rebutted with actual facts, laws, and consistant case cites. It took me several years to be able to say I may have been wrong, or least severely limited in my knowledge of property boundary law. Mr. Lucas and Mr. Stahl have been great inspirations and the major driving force behind what is now a consistant studying of what I am supposed to be doing for my clients, surveying property boundaries.

The best money I have spent in a long time was purchasing his book - The Pincushion Effect, and I look forward to the honor of having him sign it in March.

I have attended three of his presentations and bought his book "The Pincushion Effect". I found each of his presentations both engaging and informative. I learned something at each one.

Larry,

He did point out, just as you did, that when you enter into an agreement a contract exists. It is either written or verbal and the verbal contract is oftentimes the one that leads to the confusion about "what should have been done", or what "I thought you would do", or "I did not want you to do that" etc....

Thus setting the stage for potential "issues"....

Hmmm.... in reading all the replies...
Sounds to me like he is a motivational speaker for surveyors more than anything.
Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Maybe instead of the shut-up routine, Gary could get over to the Lucas seminar
room, tell them how to split the distance between row fences, eyeball the
section line fence, and set a PK nail and call it the section corner. Everyone
could in the lucas seminar could have a good laugh and chill out.

Most seminar speakers that scream do not want to be confronted.

I really enjoyed his presentation. I am more motivated now to study court cases and try to learn from them, rather than make the mistakes myself.

I don't think I would call him a motivational speaker. Perhaps a 'motivated' speaker would be more descriptive. He gets a lot of controversy, because he dispels many of the "rules" and theories many surveyors have operated by for years. He is both a land surveyor and a lawyer making him quite the legal expert on boundary and boundary law.