#13 – Wendy Lathrop

Angus Stocking: (00:09.23)
This is Everything is Somewhere. I’m Angus Stocking. Today in this special episode, our guest is Wendy Lathrop, PLS, whose column Vantage Point has appeared in every single issue save one of American Surveyor Magazine and before that, starting in the 1980s in Professional Surveyor Magazine. Wendy earned her professional land surveying license in 1983, making her only the second woman to obtain licensure in New Jersey.

She is now licensed in four states, is a certified floodplain manager, and is president and owner of Cadastral Consulting, and a sought-after consultant and expert witness on cadastral and tidal matters. Given her illustrious and trailblazing career, and the quality and quantity of her writing and teaching, must appear on any short list of the most eminent land surveyors of the 21st century, and it’s a privilege and pleasure to speak with her today.

Wendy Lathrop, welcome to Everything is Somewhere.

I’m glad to be here. I hope this is going to be a fun conversation rather than being grilled like deposition. So it’ll be a nice.

It’s not really in my vocabulary to grill a guest. That’s good. We have some questions lined up and we’ve talked about a few things, but pretty interesting I think for any listener to delve into this second female professional land surveyor. And that was in 1983, so not that long ago. What was that like? How did you become a professional land surveyor? How did that work out for you?

Wendy Lathrop: (01:43.788)
I guess it was from being stubborn and not wanting to pay attention to people saying, no, you can’t do that. You’re not a guy. So all I wanted was just to be a surveyor. kind of fell into it after I graduated from college. My undergraduate degree is something completely different, although it has helped considerably in interesting ways.

Relating to the surveying side of it, my first full-time job out of college was doing drafting for a civil engineering company based on both drafting that I had done in high school. I had done a lot of mechanical drawing and a lot of architectural drawing, although I had to fight to do that because girls weren’t supposed to do that. We were supposed to take typing or home economics, which just totally bored me.

So based on that and my art portfolio, because that was one of my, had a dual degree in Spanish and visual arts. And from there, they discovered that I could do the mathematics involved in breaking down field notes. guess it helps that I’m ambidextrous, so both halves of my brain work. And I went from that very large company to a very small company where everybody had to know how to do everything from the research to the field work to the drafting and breaking down the notes, even including the contract work and the billing part of it. And that’s where I really fell in love with surveying because of the variety in it. Just always felt like there was a new challenge and I just particularly loved the research side of it and then seeing how that fit or didn’t fit when we went out onto the field.

You know, I feel like I’ve heard that story many times of getting a degree in something else and then falling in love with land surveying after…

Wendy Lathrop: (03:52.482)
Yeah, that’s true. I’ve met a lot of people with different backgrounds, archaeology, economics, all of those kinds of things. For me, my combination of background between Spanish and visual arts was really helpful because when you think about the kinds of mathematics that we do in surveying, all the trigonometry and the geometry and even the matrix algebra, that’s all the visual kind of thinking. That’s what I was really good at. And then, of course, being able to present things in a visual way that would be understandable to a variety of backgrounds. That’s part of the visual arts scene.

The Spanish actually came in handy as well because at one point I was having to do inspection of construction sites. And if anybody was speaking either Spanish or Italian or Portuguese, I could always understand what they were saying, which meant that if they were trying to cheat, they would go over on the side and say something about, let’s only put four inches of stone and set it six. She’ll never know the difference. I would just kind of wait a few minutes and then go over and say, why don’t we just sort of measure? They never figured it out. I wasn’t about to tell them.

It was a secret weapon for you.

Yes.

Angus Stocking: (05:12.632)
So yes, there’s that spatial intelligence and then there’s the applying legal principle and the research and it’s an involved field and I’ve always spoken of it as an art rather than a science. And I think that’s where you’ve gone. We’re going to talk today, I hope, about a few of your columns and the one that we had agreed to start off on was why lawyers need surveyors, which was in the December 2024 episode of our issue of American Land Surveyor. So Wendy, what are your thoughts on the ideal relationship between land surveyors and lawyers?

Wendy: I think it should be on an equal footing. That doesn’t always happen. Sometimes there’s ego involved on one side or the other that kind of gets in the way. But realizing that attorneys come to surveyors because they need an expert who can guide them in the right direction, who can answer questions for them, and can help in terms of expert reports and things like that that will help in terms of winning a case. So if you think of most attorneys not being all that well-versed in real estate law or property law, they may have other specialties or they may be kind of general practitioners.

But I think that surveyors really have to delve into that area of law much more deeply. And in all the states, I’m licensed in four states, and in every one of them, it’s required to know the statutes and the regulations associated with the practice of serving, what’s allowable, what’s not allowable, it’s different in each of those states. But it also means paying attention to changes that are afoot because of, for instance, case law. So attorneys…

Wendy Lathrop: (07:25.226)
…are not familiar with what goes into a survey. They know what, well, they can look up the statutes and the regulations the same as we can, but they don’t even always know where to look. So that’s one of the reasons I had written that column is because I’d just come off a case where I actually had a really good relationship with the attorney, which was a pleasure after some of the cases I’ve been involved in because this attorney was willing to listen to me say, no, no, and precision do not mean the same thing. You can’t use them interchangeably.

It’s funny how often that discussion comes up between accuracy and precision. It’s drummed into surveyors quite early and comes to seem natural and obvious, but no one else in the world makes that distinction.

I think you’re pretty much on point there, that they don’t see the difference. I always hate that diagram with the target and the arrow holes and the clustered in one place or another place or scattered all over. There’s a cartoon that was in the University of California at Fresno. They used to have a newsletter that the students would contribute to on a regular basis.

And there was one cartoon that one of the students drew, which had the same picture in all four frames. was somebody trying to walk through a doorway and missing it, hitting the door frame every single time. The only thing that changed was the time on the clock that was right above his head. And the caption for it was, poor Ernie, always precise, never accurate, because he never got through the door.

Wendy Lathrop: (09:20.738)
So I just always like that one a little better because I find the other one to target a little dull. But those kinds of basics that we surveyors take for granted, the rest of the world does not. On the other hand, there are a lot of terms that attorneys will use that we as surveyors may not be familiar with, which is why I always like to… I have a law dictionary right next to my desk because…

I want to be able to speak the same language. And part of that is knowing the language that the attorney is using. And some of that is educating the attorney to speak the same language I’m using so that it should be back and forth and we get a little bit from each other. And that’s how you really build a solid case. Can’t be on one side.

Wendy, one of the things I’ve always appreciated about your writing and columns is that you have a great deal of experience and stories to tell. In this column, you had a few examples, and you’ve shared an example of things going well with Surveyor. Could you, just for our entertainment, tell us a story of an interaction with lawyer or an engagement with the lawyer in a practice that went really badly that turned out not good?

Yeah, I’ve got the most prominent in my mind about that was a case down in Louisiana where the attorneys for a developer wanted me to look at the case that they wanted to build against a surveyor who they felt should have advised them about a potential change in a base flood elevation on the flood maps, they gave me a list of 13 or 14 questions that they wanted me to address. And out of those, there was only one that I could support. And I knocked down every single other one of them because of faulty reasoning, because of faulty background, because of missing information. And they were very unhappy with me. The word that they used…

Wendy Lathrop: (11:36.43)
…was that I was handering to the other side. said, well, you know, if you try to pursue these points and they don’t turn out well, you don’t ever want to ask a question in court that you don’t already know the answer to. And if you ask these questions and you get an answer that is not what you expect, you’re going to be in a rough spot. that was the only time that I was getting ready to fire the attorneys, you fire the client. But fortunately, they changed the attorneys who were on their team and they ended up getting somebody who was a little bit more reasonable and finally understood what I was saying about you don’t really have a case which is never welcome news, I guess.

No, no. It wasn’t, you know, I was not about to change my opinion to suit them.

Yeah, and I would say that anyone who’s met you or read you understands that pandering is not the correct word for Wendy Lathrop. No. Possibly due to your kung fu experience.

Angus Stocking: (12:50.648)
Yeah, that’s something I do kind of want to talk about sometime. Let’s get that out of the way. One proper title for you is SIFU. Is that correct? If you could very briefly share with us your Kung Fu expertise, I think any land surveyor would find that interesting.

Yeah, well, I actually have advanced ranking in three different martial arts. My first was I started out in Tung Tzu Do, which is a Korean form of karate. And I have a third degree black belt in that. And right before I tested for that third degree black belt, all kinds of things you can do when you’re unattached and you don’t have to do anything except, you know, after work, except do whatever you want. can let the dust bunnies collect under the bed and things like that. So that’s when I started Kung Fu.

Mostly did a Southern form. At this point I have a master’s ranking in a Vietnamese form, which has a strong Chinese influence. And I also have, I’m also an instructor in Tai Chi. So at this point I’m not doing the karate anymore because I was in a pretty serious car accident about 30 years ago and after that I couldn’t do martial arts that required quick changes from one direction to the other without going through a more cursive and circular move which Kung Fu and Tai Chi both allow me to do.

Angus Stocking: (14:24.238)
Thank you. It’s fascinating. And I would think there would actually be some aspects of land surveying or especially the expert wet-a-sing work that you do or the consultation is a little combative or it resembles combat in some ways. Have you found a crossover from martial arts practice to land surveying practice or legal practice?

Yeah, yeah. So in the verbal arena, it means, I guess it means that I learned to yell really loud so you can hear me a thousand feet away, but that’s the least of it. It’s more about being able to take a step back and assess a situation before getting fully in.

into the emotional side of it, which is really important. For instance, if you’re depositions or testimony in court, you don’t want to let the other side see if you’re actually feeling rattled. You need to be able to keep your warrior face on and just keep that all loose enough so that you can continue on and keep your train of thought.

And physically, it also means learning to stand a certain way and being able to look somebody straight in the eye, even though maybe really shaky on the inside. You just don’t let that show.

Thank you so much. One of the great things about doing this podcast is speaking with people who are experts in their field and learning surprising things. And I did not expect a lesson on how martial arts apply to land surveying. And I think that’s useful for everyone. So thank you for that. Wendy, we had also talked about another column with the great title, La La La, I Can’t Hear You, about the way we work with contractors or…

Angus Stocking (16:33.574)
…other entities that. Well, here’s the opening sentence. Sometimes it seems the biggest job we have is helping clients recognize what it is they really need, which is not always what they think they need. Could you elaborate there? It’s a very simple, clear truth that land surveyors learn fairly early, because our profession is different than being a lawyer or a doctor. We sometimes have to educate the client more often than many professionals. How has that worked out for you?

Wendy: So that particular column was about, was inspired by one particular case. So there was a developer who had asked to surveyor. Basically all he asked for was how much, how many acres is this tract of land that I’m interested in? Which it, but there was no written contract, which is a major, major problem because that made it really tough to say what was really agreed upon between the parties, the surveyor and the developer and what was not.

The reason there was a suit was that the developer had gone ahead and bought this piece of land that he knew how many acres were in because he had this survey that told him and had completely ignored some of advice from somebody else about maybe you want to check for wetlands before you buy that piece of property and told that that person basically just shove off. After he bought the piece of property and started looking into what he was actually going to need to do the development, that’s when he realized, yeah, he was going to need to see if there were wetlands on it or not…

Wendy Lathrop: (18:31.768)
…but he didn’t want to hear that beforehand, turned out that a significant amount of this property was wetlands. When I went out to look at it, the first thing I saw was what we call skunk cabbage out here. It looks like a cabbage and it’s called skunk cabbage. It’s really pretty, it’s huge, it can be up to three feet across, but it smells horrible if you break any of the leaves. So that’s the skunk part of it. And there were also bull rushes. So it was really evident to me that, yeah, there were wetlands on there. I kept asking, so what did you two agree on? Where’s anything in writing? Nothing. The only notes I asked were there in complete files and all that the developer had were these little pieces of paper that we used to, in the days before voicemailing, had these little pieces of pink paper while you were out.

That was all that was in there, nothing else. So, you know, he didn’t want to hear from me that no, the surveyor wasn’t required as a matter of state standards to show wetlands on a piece of property unless it was requested. is there anything you can show that you asked for? And then when I saw the deposition where it was clear that he had been told by somebody else, maybe you should check and had brushed them off. That’s where this la la la, can’t hear you idea came from.

So just to be clear, in this case, you were a consulting surveyor. You were giving a second opinion to the developer.

Wendy Lathrop: (20:18.068)
I was hired by his attorney to look into it to see whether or not the surveyor was or was not required to provide information about wetlands.

And the answer was that he only would have been, had he been contractually, had there been an agreement to do that. And that was not the case. So that’s a good lesson for everyone involved in getting a survey or for being clear about things. And poor developer, I assume he lost money on that project.

Exactly. Right.

Wendy Lathrop: (20:50.56)
I think he probably did. The other thing that happened with that, it turned out there was a 350 foot wide easement for future high tension wires across the property, but he didn’t understand that either. So that’s a big red flag about what surveyors should be explaining to their clients when you show something like that. Why do you need the survey? What is it for?

What do you plan to do with this property so that we can help the client a little bit more and whether there’s a really nice, clean, clear contract or not, I think that kind of conversation ahead of time would have helped. But I definitely think they both should have thought about having something in writing.

When you just sort of, as we’re talking, it sort of suggests the question to me, and that would be, is there like a structural problem in the respect with which surveyors are held? Is there a fix for some of these, if there was a greater standing under law for surveyors, or if they were by law involved earlier?

What would you suggest be done? How do we fix this problem of not working well with times with surveyors or lawyers? Excuse me.

I really think it boils down to better communication skills on everybody’s part. That surveyors need to be asking more questions rather than somebody calling up and saying, Hey, I need some spot shots for elevations on this site. Say, and why do you need that? But that question doesn’t come up for a lot of people. just say, sure, I can do that. But if they know, this is going to be for a site plan or then maybe they’re going to say, maybe you should check…

Wendy Lathrop: (22:48.654)
…for underground utilities and maybe you need contours and not just spot shots. We really need to talk, have some kind of, and that educates the client as well because most laypersons and attorneys don’t know what goes into a survey, a survey and the fact that there are different kinds of surveys that answer different kinds of questions about a property.

A topographic or bathymetric survey is going to answer different questions than a boundary survey is going to answer. Same thing, judicial surveys are going to answer very specific kinds of questions. And the client needs to be educated by the surveyor enough to know that they don’t know what they don’t know. Sometimes we know we don’t know, but a lot of times clients don’t know what they don’t know.

And unless surveyors try to draw that out, what the purpose of the survey is to guide the client in the right direction, there’s almost always going to be some kind of clash at the end, which can be unnecessarily expensive for both sides because court is not cheap.

So better conversations at the beginning of jobs or engagements.

Yeah, I’d say that would solve a lot. Not just inserving.

Angus Stocking: (24:17.032)
Well, yeah, yeah, it’s a general principle that could be applied more often in land surveying. And the third column of yours that really struck me as I was getting ready for this, and to be clear, there’s how many columns are there now? 40, 50, more?

Wendy: I have no idea. I’ve been writing… So before I wrote for American Surveyor, I wrote for what was then Professional Surveyor. And when that publication got sold, I moved with the editor to his new magazine because I was going to stay with Professional Surveyor, which is now xyHt. But the…

…people who I was trying to work with there were a little condescending towards, well, at least towards me. I don’t know if they were towards other writers, but I didn’t feel like I was being treated like I knew what I was talking about. And I just, I didn’t feel good about it. So I decided to leave, at which point Marc Cheves, who had been the editor at Professional Surveyor and started American Surveyor, asked if I would write for him, said, sure. It’s been a long time, since sometime in the 1980s I’ve been writing.

I can give you a little insight there. I’m an infrastructure writer now. In addition to the columns, I write professionally on geospatial and infrastructure and this and that. And so I’ve written on a professional basis for xyHt and written for vendors and clients who… I also found the other magazine to be a little…

Angus Stocking: (26:07.138)
…condescending and hard to work with compared to Marc Cheves. So certainly I’ve appreciated him over the years. One of the articles that I wanted to get to was how much research is enough on the very, which is just an important question. What are your thoughts on that? It’s a difficult, do we just go to the, the county and look up some things or is there more involved? And I was particularly interested in your thoughts on… Let’s see. To do research beyond deeds as in maybe even getting going on knocking on doors. How has that worked out for you over the years?

Yeah, so the whole question about how much research and what kind of research, it really varies with each different survey or each different case or project that I’m involved with. Sometimes it’s a matter of, it’s because I’m arguing with a title company. That seems to happen a lot these days. Title companies do things very differently now than how they were used to, how that used to be done way back when I started surveying back in the mid to late 70s. Part of that is because the people who are doing searches in the counties do their searches only necessarily back to, especially in the states that have what we call marketable title laws.

Meaning you only have to search back as far as a statute say, if you don’t re-record your interests in a real piece of property over X number of years, usually like 30 years, 40 years, then you’re possibly going to lose those rights. It’s meant to clean the slate of what they call stale claims. So some searchers don’t go back any further than that. And a lot of searchers are not plotting out…

Wendy Lathrop: (28:12.376)
…deeds anymore, so they get the wrong deeds. It’s pretty frustrating. So this thing about how much research is enough, part of it is what’s the question I’m trying to answer, going back to the whole communication thing, and then whether deeds that have been supplied are sufficient whether I have to go back further in the chain of title, whether I need to go back further in the chain of title for the lots that abut the property we’re dealing with, go back to the creation of all those lots. Sometimes in terms of trying to figure out how these little pieces of land fit together means that we have to track down what names were in the family, what were former names of towns? What were the former names of some roads?

So I end up looking at old maps sometimes. Sometimes I’ll look at genealogical trees. Sometimes I’ll look at grave site websites. Find a grave is a really good one for that. It depends on what it is that I’m trying to answer. But so I don’t have like a specific routine for every single project that I get involved with because each time I’m supposed to be answering a different question and sometimes in the process of doing the research for that, I find that there were more questions than what the client thought were the questions, even after our discussion about why do you need this and how can I help come up with some resolution for that.

I just want to draw up a contract for that. Do you just leave provision out there that in case you find out something that tells you you have to do more research, that that’s going to happen? Do you bill by the hour? What’s the proceeding for a professional surveyor?

Wendy Lathrop: (30:16.344)
For a lot of these, yeah. So I don’t have a real long complicated contract. It’s pretty simple because I’m trying to write it in plain language that anybody can understand. So I’m not using any surveyor ease in it or title searcher ease in it. This is just plain language. What I’ll lay out, what it is that we’ve talked about and what we’ve agreed was the reason that I’m being hired and then I’ll put something in there about if along the way I find that there are other questions that we should be addressing, then we need to renegotiate because sometimes, so every contract’s a little different.

Some of them are based on strictly hourly rates and I may give an estimate and I think it’s gonna take X number of hours. But if I get within some percentage of those completed hours, and it looks like I’m going to exceed it, I always stop and talk with the client ahead of time and say, this is what I’m finding, there are these problems. What would you like me to do about this? Would you like me to keep going, in which case it’s very likely going to exceed what we thought it was going to cost? Or is this enough information to get you what it is that you wanted to know in the first place?

Thank you for that practical information for the Working Land Surveyor. And part of that is maybe now is a good time to mention that you are president and owner of Cadastral Consulting LLC, a private business. Could you tell us a bit about your business? How big is Cadastral Consulting now or how big has it been? What’s your success been like?

So it’s kind of interesting how this happened. The company itself, so I have owned it since early 2000, 2003, 2004, somewhere in there. So I have owned it since then. And basically it’s me as a consultant. And then there is a group of people who are, I don’t, they’re not my…

Wendy Lathrop: (32:39.648)
…employees, basically I am kind of a central place for them to be reached for doing teaching or contracting. the way this came about was after I saw a lot of things, I have a short temper. I’ve been told that goes along with red hair. My hair used to be a lot redder than it is these days. But anyways,

I had worked for somebody else and just got very, very frustrated with that place. And I finally decided that I needed to leave, at which point I went back to grad school and finished up my master’s in environmental policy because they do a lot of floodplain management as well as surveying and they fit together really well. But in the process, I had been teaching, co-teaching certain classes with my friend Dennis Mouland, who lives out in the western part of the country. And when he went back to work for the Bureau of Land Management as a federal employee, he could not have an outside business.

So to keep the name of the company going, and since people knew me through him as well, I bought the name and some of the resources from him, but then I expanded it and had a new group of speakers that can be contracted through this organization. But mostly I use that, the company for doing consulting work, which is basically all I’m doing these days. I keep trying to retire and it doesn’t work because I just like surveying too much and I care back and then somebody comes up with something really interesting.

And because I have a kind of unusual combination of backgrounds, sometimes I’m the only person that I can think of who can even start to address it for them or get them on the right track. So I end up taking these extra jobs and it’s someday maybe I’ll actually get to retirement. I’m just trying to slow down at this point. So I do the consulting and I’m still teaching, but not as much as I used to because that’s really…

Wendy Lathrop: (35:05.774)
…hired for an introvert to go out in front of people and

No, I quite agree. In my life, I’ve been on stage a fair amount. It’s been a cold sweat every time, but people tell me I do okay. And I think that must be the case for you as well. I have observed over the years that there’s a pretty strong connection between good writing ability and the desire to write and land surveyors. seems like land surveyors are well represented in the ranks of good writers, books, and even novels.

Yeah.

Angus Stocking: (35:39.502)
important has it been for you to be a regular contributor of Insightful Columns over the years and other work? Are you working on a book or do you have a book out? How has writing in particular been a good thing for your land surveying practice?

I think it’s integral to be able to write well. I have, I co-wrote a book with Stephen Estopinal on descriptions. Let’s see, what’s the exact title? Something like real property descriptions, composition, construction and comprehension.

I’ll get that in the show notes.

But the whole thing about writing, my writing style and technique has changed over the years because I realized that I was writing very stiffly and also that sometimes I was writing too technically because I would run things sometimes past my husband who’s not a land surveyor. He does the same thing for me. He’s a research physician. He’ll run things past me and I’ll say, what’s this, what’s that, what’s the other thing?

So if I run some things past him and he asks me questions and I know I need to simplify the language or explain some terms and things like that, I actually even started taking writing classes on that. But I find that’s incredibly helpful and I try very hard to write in a way that’s going to be accessible to a variety of readers. When I’m writing an expert report,

Wendy Lathrop: (37:19.416)
That is absolutely critical because especially for a judge who may not have a background in real property in any sense, other than maybe help want a closing for a family member or something like that, they need to be able to understand the points that we’re making as surveyors without stumbling over concepts that we kind of take for granted finished, just closed up a case, and we won it on summary judgment. And I think a big part of that was because, so it was a brand new judge had just been appointed to the court and her background was in child welfare.

So I knew I had to explain everything from scratch. This was a case where somebody was claiming certain rights on a piece of property and trace their deed back to a sheriff’s deed for a foreclosure on a mortgage. And that mortgage had included a property that the borrower did not even own. They had a lease on it and didn’t own it. So there was this foreclosure and the plaintiff on the other side was saying, look, I have a deed and it traces back to the sheriff’s deed.

So explaining to a judge what it is that a deed is, why certain deeds may have not actually transferred any rights because they’re quit claims and explaining what quit claim means, explaining what a foreclosure is, explaining all of these terms and laying it out step by step from the beginning, all the way through to the current time, including the statement in the current title policy, the title insurance. The plaintiff didn’t have a policy. She had a commitment for insurance and never went through with buying the policy. But there was a statement in there saying that the title company was not willing to insure this one piece of property because they couldn’t clear the title on it.

Wendy Lathrop: (39:47.352)
So being able to explain what that meant in plain language, one of the things I did was I broke, I started out with kind of bullet points of where I was gonna go, almost an outline, and then filled in each part. And then I ran it through a document checker, not just for spelling and grammar and making sure that I reread it because I don’t trust spelling checkers. They put the wrong word in there and say it’s close enough, things like that, but I wanted to check it to see what reading level it would be at. So my goal was actually to have it like 12th grade reading level. I couldn’t quite get it there. I got it down to 14th grade. giving the judge credit for having at least two years of college. But I think that’s important is make it so that you don’t necessarily know what the background of the reader is gonna be.

So make it as complete as possible, but as concise at the same time, not lots of extraneous little details that might be interesting to another surveyor, but doesn’t really get to the heart of the question that’s being asked or that needs to be asked. to me, I’m always trying to improve my writing.

I think I can do a lot better than I do now, but hopefully I’m better than I used to be. think I am. But it’s, to me, that part of the reason that we went on summary judgment was that it was clear enough, and I had the proper illustrations and diagrams in there each step of the way as well, for somebody with no background in real property law to be able to understand it.

You are so right in all of that, and I really appreciate your perspective. My career has been kind of a weird inversion of that. I was a pretty good writer. And because I’m a professional land surveyor, and I’ve actually been on job sites and worked with a consulting firm and had a lot of experience, that made me much more successful as a professional writer of marketing content. Pretty modest.

Angus Stocking: (42:12.11)
But it was important in my career as a writer that I actually knew something about land surveying. And you’re saying that it’s been important to your career as a land surveyor that you became a better, more lucid writer and were able to explain to people better what you were… Just an interesting relationship between writing and thinking and land surveying and professional expertise and…

I appreciate your perspective there.

Yeah, I think as surveyors, we don’t all think in the same patterns because we come from different backgrounds. And some are, so I am a very visual thinker, which is how I solve problems. can, and when I’m charting out what it is I’m going to write, it’s not necessarily a nice, neat, you know, when I was saying I had a bullet list, they didn’t start out all in one place, little scraps of paper and I move them around that kind of thing because I’m that kind of a visual thinker. I have to see how one thing will follow another. But I think as surveyors, use every part of our brain. We have this analytical side of it. We have the visual side of it, but we also have the communication side of it because it’s not just clients we have to explain things to, it’s the other people we’re working with.

If I’m taking things back to somebody else I’m working with, they need to know what it is that I did, how I did it, why did I choose to do it this way instead of another way. So communication is, no matter which side of it that you’re putting more time into, whether it’s the writing side of it or whether it’s the surveying side of it, I think that the communication and surveying, they’re

Wendy Lahtrop: (44:14.114)
They’re just inseparable. And it helps us ask ourselves the question, why am I doing this?

That’s almost a good definition of what makes a good Lancer Bear would be the marriage or harmony between spatial intelligence and verbal intelligence, kind of the essence of the art.

I think that’s it.

Wendy, I have one more question based on a column. This is kind of out of left field because we didn’t talk about it beforehand, but you wrote recently about artificial intelligence. I think specifically, ChatGPT and you asked for… Could you maybe recap? What’s your current feeling about the role that AI is going to play in the professions generally and land surveying in particular?

I think the main thing is that surveyors can use it, but don’t be lazy and rely on it without checking absolutely everything that it does. So what you’re referring to is a column where I had done a little bit of experimentation with it to see what it would come up with for different assignments that I gave it. One of them was come up with an outline for a class on a particular topic.

Wendy Lathrop: (45:35.598)
And that one wasn’t, that was reasonable. And then another one was, okay, write a biography of me. And what, unless you’re feeding it the appropriate information, it is just going to scrape the web. And if it doesn’t know something, it’s just going to make something up. So the biography that it wrote about me just really had a lot of.

I guess they call them hallucinations, but it was a little bit more than that. It was just complete fabrication, like fairy tale kind of stuff. Like I’d always wanted to be a sur-er-er, sorry.

You’d like to meet that person.

Yeah, yeah, that certainly was not me. So for some things, you can ask AI to do a number of things. You can have it write something from scratch, just scraping things off the web, but there’s a lot of material on the internet that’s not reliable and it doesn’t know the difference. So it can put all kinds of garbage in there and then fill in the blank where it doesn’t really know the answer.

And you can also put, can upload documents or data of your own to have it rely just on that until it just work with this. And it may pull out things that you didn’t think were the important aspects. It may decide that it’s going to focus on something else other than where you wanted it to go. So then you have to keep kind of honing the questions that you…

Wendy Lathrop: (47:15.95)
…to it as to what you want it to write about, what you want it to leave out, what you want it to expand on. But you still need to check it every single sentence, every single factoid that’s in there because it’s still, I still don’t trust it. But then again, I’m a big skeptic about a lot of things. I’m same way with people. I just don’t take anything at face value, want a “tell me more, tell me more”, and then I will check things on my own as well, reaching the same conclusions.

I’m a professional writer, right? And so everyone in the field right now is thinking, do we still have jobs? You know, or can everything I do be done by AI? And like you say, obviously a lot can be done, research and maybe a first draft, but the hallucinations are extreme. And, one thing a chatbot can’t do is do the interview for you or know what a project’s about.

There’s a lot of room for the expert to actually apply expertise and make things better and just to check, so trust but verify.

Exactly. And the other part about it is you can tell it to write in a more formal voice or less formal voice and things like that, but you have to be careful about what it does because when I did that during my experimentation, it just kept taking information out when I said, write it in a less, I didn’t say less stilted, I said less formal. And it just took a bunch of meat out. And at the end it was this piece of fluff. Didn’t actually even.

Wendy Lathrop: (48:59.342)
Have any information in it.

Angus: Wendy, this has been fantastic. I know that myself and many land surveyors have conceived a great deal of respect for you over the years, just reading your columns and the insight you give to the profession. So I guess I want to say thank you for being such a fine writer and teacher in the profession, and thank you for making time for this interview.

Wendy: Well, thanks for the compliments and it’s been a pleasure talking. I always enjoy talking with you in particular, but with surveyors in general.

Angus Stocking: (49:46.446)
It’s certainly an honor to speak with Wendy Lathrop and a lot of fun too, as hers is one of the most interesting and authoritative voices in modern land surveying. I confess I made a mistake in this interview when I guessed that Wendy had published 40 or 50 columns in American Surveyor. In fact, she has published 98 columns and will exceed 100 in 2025. Just an amazing body of work.

The exact title of the book Wendy wrote with Stephen B. Estopinal is Professional Surveyors and Real Property Descriptions, Composition, Construction, and Comprehension, and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. I’ll also link to the archive of Wendy’s vantage point columns, and finally, I’ll provide a link to a page discussing skunk cabbages because I had no idea what she was talking about when she mentioned them.

Maybe it’s because all my field work has been in the Western United States. Everything is Somewhere is now routinely providing a transcript and useful show notes with every podcast, so look for those if you’re trying to follow up on something interesting. Or feel free to email me directly at angusstocking at gmail.com. That’s angus like the cow, stocking like a fishnet stocking at gmail.com.

or email me anonymously if you like at amerserv.com slash podcast. That’s amerisurv.com/podcast or reach out on LinkedIn. I am always happy to connect with listeners and I’m easy to find. There is only one Angus Docking because I’m vain.

I’ll share an email everything is somewhere received this week from a listener named Steve who writes, just wanted to say that I found your podcast recently and it’s awesome. I hope you’ll keep going. It’s such an interesting subject framing and each of the three guests I heard so far have been unique and awesome perspectives. Thanks. Steve and I chatted briefly and he suggested an episode on the megalithic yard, which is right up my alley.

Angus Stocking: (52:07.412)
Unfortunately, I have not been able to identify a good guest on this topic. So, an appeal to listeners. If you are an expert on megalithic land surveying practice or can put me in touch with such an expert, please reach out. For years I’ve wondered why podcast hosts and YouTube video producers always ask for subscribes and likes and now I know. Simply put, it helps a lot.

So please, if you’re enjoying Everything is Somewhere, be a geospatial superhero and subscribe on iTunes and if you’re feeling really special rate a review an episode. You’ll help the show and I will thank you in one of these outros. That’s it for this episode. Until next time, may your measurements be both precise and accurate, may you keep things level and plumb and stay safe out there.