Yep- exactly
here is a good one,
client hired us a while ago to survey his property because and i QUOTE "all the plans are wrong " so the land in question is LAND COURT land (which by Definition the plans HAVE to be right-it is a requirement) we are like, ok whatever.
do our survey,.
locate record bounds from land court,,,and it all matches up with land court.. "no no that is not right", - now if the client WAS right...over 100 houses - that has been built and lived in for over 50 years, the houses are not on the lots they own, the street is in the wrong spot, etc..and which in my opinion, the court would just say, too bad, the plans that match up with current conditions are "right" case over..be a perfect justification for using adverse possession to "fix" the lot lines, except for one thing, by law you CANNOT adverse possess land court land in MA.
guy produces the land court - survey- plan from 1911..and goes. that point "here" is there, so i am like oookkaaaayyy..
i get a copy of the plan- and all plans, deeds, takings etc of the area, and reproduce- as best i can from a reallllly poor condition survey plan- the original traverse which plots the land via angles - to the nearest minute- and distances, with 90degree tie distances to walls... my initial go thru didn't "close" by ~150 feet(this is BAD!)- i went clockwise around the perimeter. so i am like hmm... decide to take the same " start point" then go around the survey perimeter counterclockwise - to see if i had messed up a distance or angle, and it closed well (off by ~.2') if i removed the first distance i had used originally going the other way.
whipping out a magnifying glass, that distance was not a traverse distance but a tie to a wall that intersects the traverse line... using this fix and plotting the 1911 location of his house on the plan, then overlaying the Land Court plans of record on the survey...matched "perfectly"....plotting our field survey of said house ...matched "perfectly" (considering i had to scale the house dimensions on the original plan... show the resultant plan to the client and i quote my client "no that is not right"
so we go out and expand our survey, to humor the guy(@900 dollars a day field survey work), the guy shows us a bound- Across the road and down the street, and goes, this bound here is supposed to be this bound (pointing at a bound from the original land court plan) since i HAVE all the record plans- including the state County LAYOUT of the road said bound is on, i am like not a fucking chance in hell (not saying this to the client, but to the field crew and the boss- who all agree with me)... tell the client that bound is "this" bound on the county layout, this bound has nothing to do with your property...and of course, he does not believe us...
fast forward to last week, we get a certified mail..from court... our clients daughter is getting sued by a different survey company and they are asking for us to show up and testify about what we found about the property.. we are thinking that -unbeknownst to us they had a different survey company previously and never paid them, this are getting sued.
our position will be, if we knew that survey was never paid, we never would have taken the job, as to the survey work relating the position of the house on the land in question...our client is nuts, the land court plans - according to all the evidence we have found says that they are correct.(every monument we found for the survey was within 0.1' as shown on the land court and other plans of record)...