You own an oyster lease. You farm it. You put down crushed concrete or limestone (culch) to give the baby oysters (spat) a place to grow and be happy. Then you harvest them and sell them to restaurants.
Small little note though: you don’t actually own the oyster lease. The hint is right there in the name - you lease it. And let’s just say, for happenstance, you aren’t the best about recording your sales or, you know, paying your taxes.
Anyway, a tug comes and does some damage to your oyster lease, so you sue. And you get $7,000,000, because your lawyers convince a jury that you suffered $7,000,000 in damages. And the other side appeals it and it gets upheld on appeal. And then it goes to the Louisiana Supreme Court, where, weirdly, sanity breaks out.
Your lawyers argued that the OLDEB (pronounced Old Ebb) formula applies. OLDEB is sort of a way to . . . well, it’s a lot. It’s a formula by which mineral rights holders and oyster lease holders can come to terms before work is done. And what you do is you take a survey of the oysters before the oil + gas work and a different survey after the work, and you see what’s happened. But you, lease-holder, probably don’t have a before survey here, because you weren’t planning to file suit.
The Louisiana Supreme Court says that’s no good: no using the OLDEB formula this way. And what’s more, the ordinary plaintiff oyster expert report that says there are millions of dollars worth of damages is no good either. It orders a new trial.
What does this mean? We’ll see. It means that oyster claims will end up being significantly smaller is the best guess.