All posts by : Stumpy Harris

1. Call us right away.
   1. There is no risk:
      1. If there is no condemnation, there is no fee.
      2. If there is a condemnation, then the government must pay our fees.
      3. We have long standing relationships with highly qualified eminent domain consultants and experts such as appraisers, land use experts, and engineers. They will work on your case and accept the fees paid by the taking authority at the end of the case. You have no obligation to pay them.
   2. We will monitor the project and keep you informed.
   3. We will advise you if there is anything you need to do before the condemnation.
2. The government cannot take your property unless it makes what is called a “First Written Offer”. This offer must be based on a valid appraisal and the government must give you a copy of that appraisal.
   1. This is when we start to do our work in earnest.
   2. We will retain (at no risk to you) all the experts needed to get you Full Compensation.
   3. We will have a meeting in our office or wherever it is convenient to establish how we should proceed to maximize your compensation.
   4. Depending upon the difference between the government’s offer and what we believe the property is worth, we will try to settle in a pre-suit agreement, seek to settle at mediation which will be required by the court, and if need be, we will try the case.

For virtually every federal constitutional right where you believe you have a claim, you can file a lawsuit in federal court. But under a 1985 ruling, any claim that your property was taken without just compensation required property owners to file their lawsuit at the state level. To make matters worse, a 2005 case held that if the state court decided again a property owner, the federal court could not overturn that decision. The two cases together meant that no federal court could decide whether the takings clause had been violated.

The Supreme Court recently corrected this in an important property rights case -Knick v. Township of Scott. This 2019 ruling restored the right of property owners to go directly to federal court once they have experienced the unconstitutional taking of their property. You must exhaust your administrative remedies first, but that has always been the case.

We take pride that we work small eminent domain/condemnation cases just as hard and carefully as we do large cases. The field of eminent domain/condemnation involves the Constitutional Right which requires that the owner be “fully compensated” for any property taken from them. Because this is a constitutional right, we take all cases without regard to the potential compensation at issue. In our view, it is a matter of constitutional right and not a matter of amount. Every owner deserves to be fully compensated. That is what we do in all cases small, medium or large.