Dallas Has its Own ‘Landman,’ and She Owns the Firm
Leslie Tipping is one of the 25% of landmen in the United States who are women.
(Angela Piazza / Staff Photographer, Dallas Morning News)
Inside her meticulously tidy office on West Lovers Lane in Dallas, Leslie Tipping places a large stack of papers on her desk, slips into her seat, and slides on thick-framed glasses.
Though she’s doing paperwork in the heart of the city, a worm’s-eye view painting of a pumpjack hanging behind her hints at her landman roots ― which she insists is not nearly as dramatic as a certain hit streaming series makes it look.
Her firm, Tipping Mineral Management, has been operating for a little more than a year with a handful of staffers offering expert mineral rights management services, including lease negotiations, royalty audits and portfolio management.
Founding her own company was intimidating, even for a statuesque expert operating at the highest levels of a fossil fuels industry that’s still largely male dominated.
But Tipping wanted to provide her clients with proactive management, and the bonus white-glove approach is just how she does things.
“This is our bread and butter,” Tipping said.
Earning the Landman Title
Tipping remembers her first “bust” when she was a teenager in the 1980s, the ripple effect of plunging oil prices that ricocheted across the Lone Star State.
Growing up in Houston as the daughter of a petroleum engineer, Tipping watched just about everyone she knew be impacted, whether they were directly tied to the energy business or on the fringes. People were forced to sell their businesses, homes and cars.
“It was just really eye opening to what happens,” she said. “I steered away from [the industry] as long as I could, but it just drives you back in.”
After spending several years in probate and estate planning in Houston and Dallas — an experience she said made her better at her job — she went all in on oil and gas.
She was in the oil patch negotiating with the best of them and “slamming books” at the county clerk’s office before the internet digitized a lot of the process. At 6-foot-2, many of the male landmen referred to her as “Tall Girl,” sometimes forgetting that wasn’t actually her name.
(Angela Piazza / Staff Photographer, Dallas Morning News)
Now about one-fourth of landmen in the U.S. are women, and everyone seems to think they know what the job entails because of the popularity of Taylor Sheridan’s TV series Landman.
But Tipping can still recall in the early 2000s, when she had interactions too colorful and inappropriate to be printed in the pages of a newspaper, she said.
“Believe me, I earned the right to the title of ‘landman.’”
She excelled, and was quickly promoted to crew chief, with 30 landmen spread across Tarrant, Parker and Palo Pinto counties ― all reporting to her.
Together, they provided services like negotiating leases and running title building abstracts for large oil and gas companies across Texas and Oklahoma.
She called that time in her career fun, fulfilling and exciting. Her smile when talking about the explosion of the Barnett Shale confirms it.
“It created so much wealth here in D-FW for not just the mineral owners but jobs,” Tipping said. “The industry itself completely changed. I mean, we are talking about the actual creation and use of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. This was really the beginning of that and I’m very proud to be a part of it.”
When natural gas prices plummeted, crews searched for business elsewhere, expanding into the Haynesville Shale in Louisiana, Scoop Stack plays in Oklahoma and the Permian Basin. That didn’t prevent Tipping from eventually laying people off, including her father.
Because of that, she pivoted to become the regional director of mineral management at JPMorgan Chase Bank for a few years. She then briefly returned to landman work in the Permian Basin and most recently, served as the head of oil, gas and mineral management at the Northern Trust Company.
Tipping repeatedly found herself frustrated by the red tape and typical opacity of the business, ultimately deciding to hang up her own shingle.
“That’s when I decided to take my experience from both industries and create Tipping Mineral Management that solely focuses on mineral assets for our clients without the background noise of anything else going on,” she said.
“We’re not a checkbox service.”
Now she work directly with clients. Some live down the street and visit for coffee, often while others live as far as London or Italy, because gone are the days when mineral owners have to live on top of their assets.
Some have kept detailed records of their family-owned mineral interests and others have newly inherited hundreds of mineral tracks across the country and aren’t quite sure what to do with them.
Tipping said she and her staff become an extension of their clients’ family businesses and they treat them as such.
“I loved being a landman so, so much,” Tipping said. “Sometimes I dream about going back to it, but now I feel like I’ve got the best of both worlds.”
Feature written by Lana Ferguson for Dallas Morning News | July 2025