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LD/SPEC.005 — The Approach Specification

Land Desk by Magaji Law — How Land Comes to the Desk

§1. Purpose

LD/SPEC.001 built the Gates but left no door. It states, correctly, that vendors approach the chambers and the chambers opens the folio — and then provides no channel by which the approach is made. In practice this meant the Desk could verify land it did not have and publish folios it could not originate.

This Specification supplies the missing channel and disciplines it, so that a route in does not become a marketplace by accident.

The governing doctrine, stated once and binding throughout:

An offer is not a folio. Nothing offered is published. The chambers opens folios; vendors do not.

§2. The Doctrine of the Approach

2.1 The approach is private. An offer creates no public page, no listing, no stub, and no index entry. It is correspondence with a chambers, transmitted through a form. The Desk's public face is unchanged by the arrival of a hundred offers or none.

2.2 The offer is not an application to publish. The vendor is not submitting a property. He is tendering documents for examination, and asking whether the chambers will take the matter up. What follows is the chambers' decision, made on the chambers' standard, at the chambers' election.

2.3 The Desk may decline any offer, at any stage, without stating a reason publicly. No vendor acquires a right to the Gates by paying to enter them.

2.4 The Desk is not the vendor's agent. It acts for the integrity of the record. Where a folio publishes, it publishes for the purchaser's benefit and the Desk's own account, not as advocacy for the vendor. This clause is recited in every mandate and may not be varied by agreement:

The chambers cannot be instructed to a conclusion.

2.5 Accordingly, no offer confers any expectation of publication, price, or timeline, and no communication during the approach may be represented by a vendor as a verification, an endorsement, or a finding of the chambers.

§3. The Offer Record

3.1 Each approach opens an offer record, coded sequentially OF-2026-0001, OF-2026-0002, … Offer codes are never reused and never appear on any public page.

3.2 The offer record holds: the vendor's particulars and capacity as claimed; the parcel as described; the title type as claimed; the documents tendered; the stage history; the Gate board where the offer reaches the Gates; and the internal decision record.

3.3 The offer record is internal in its entirety. It is disclosed to no person other than the vendor, the chambers, and any authority lawfully entitled to demand it.

3.4 An offer record is never deleted. Decline and lapse are stages, not erasures — the same discipline LD/SPEC.001 §6.6 applies to folios, applied to what never became one.

§4. Stage Lifecycle

4.1 An offer holds exactly one stage at any time:

RECEIVED → SCREENED → MANDATED → IN GATES → CLEARED

with DECLINED, LAPSED and WITHDRAWN reachable from any stage.

4.2 Definitions:

• RECEIVED — approach recorded; nothing yet read.
• SCREENED — the Preliminary Screen of §5 is complete and the parcel is judged worth gating.
• MANDATED — the vendor has executed the mandate and the Gate Fee is confirmed. Only from this stage may a Gate open.
• IN GATES — one or more of Gates V1–V7 (LD/SPEC.001 §5) is running or passed.
• CLEARED — all seven Gates passed. The offer ends here and a folio begins (§8).
• DECLINED — the Desk will not proceed. Recorded with its defect classes under §9.
• LAPSED — the mandate period expired without clearance (§7.4).
• WITHDRAWN — the vendor withdrew.

4.3 Every stage transition records its date and the officer effecting it.

§5. The Preliminary Screen

5.1 Every offer receives a Preliminary Screen at no charge, ordinarily within two working days of a complete approach.

5.2 The Screen is a reading of the papers as tendered, and answers one question only: is this parcel worth putting through the Gates? It is not a verdict, not a search, not an opinion on title, and confers nothing on the parcel.

5.3 The Screen is free because it protects the Desk before it serves the vendor. Most offers end here, and it is not in the chambers' interest for cost to stand between it and an early no.

5.4 A vendor wanting an opinion on his documents rather than entry to the Gates is directed to the Verdict under LD/SPEC.002, which is a different instrument at a different fee.

§6. The Mandate and the Gate Fee

6.1 No Gate opens before a written mandate is executed and the Gate Fee is confirmed.

6.2 The Gate Fee is quoted per parcel, on the Screen, and is not published as a tariff: a residential plot at Mararaba and twenty hectares of family land at Keffi are not the same search, and a single advertised figure would be a lie about one of them.

6.3 The Gate Fee is a fee for the process, not the outcome. It is not refundable on a failed Gate, and this is recited in the mandate in terms:

The Gate Fee purchases the examination, not the result of the examination. A parcel that fails has consumed the same work as a parcel that passes, and more.

6.4 Limited exclusivity. For the mandate period, the vendor undertakes not to sell, encumber, or mandate the parcel elsewhere, and to disclose any existing offer. The Desk will not fund searches on land that may be sold beneath them.

6.5 The Gate Fee is a professional fee of the chambers and is billed by the chambers. No fee is taken through this website (LD/SPEC.001 §8.1 is unaffected: the platform holds no funds).

§7. Passage through the Gates

7.1 A mandated offer is examined under LD/SPEC.001 §5. The Gates are not restated here and are not varied for a vendor's convenience.

7.2 The offer's Gate board records, for each of V1–V7, its state, date, officer, documentary reference, and note. This board is the draft of the folio's Layer II and becomes it on clearance.

7.3 A Gate failure holds the offer or declines it, at the Principal's direction. Gate V4 — root of title and customary consent — declines the offer outright where consents cannot be completely evidenced, whatever the state of the paper (LD/SPEC.001 §5.1, V4).

7.4 The mandate period is 90 days from confirmation of the Gate Fee, aligned to the Gate expiry of LD/SPEC.001 §5.4. An offer not cleared within it lapses, and re-entry is a fresh mandate.

§8. Clearance

8.1 On the passage of Gate V7, the offer is CLEARED and ends. Clearance is not publication; it is the exhaustion of the approach.

8.2 The chambers then opens a folio under LD/SPEC.001 §3, allocating the next folio code. The Gate board is carried into Layer II and frozen under LD/SPEC.001 §5.9.

8.3 The folio is the canonical record from that moment. The offer record survives as the account of how the parcel arrived, and is not merged into the folio, cited on it, or published with it. The folio code and the offer code are cross-referenced internally only.

8.4 Publication remains governed by LD/SPEC.001 §6 and §13. Clearance obliges the Desk to nothing; a cleared parcel the Desk elects not to publish is simply not published.

§9. Decline

9.1 A declined vendor receives the chambers' reasons in writing. He is entitled to know why his land failed, and to take that knowledge elsewhere.

9.2 Reasons are never published, and no declined parcel, vendor, or locality is identified in any public document.

9.3 Every decline is tagged at the point of decision with the defect classes it disclosed, from the closed taxonomy at LD/SPEC.003 §3, and enters the Bulletin's data as pattern only, subject to the minimum cell size of LD/SPEC.003 §2.2.

9.4 This is the Bulletin's second source. The Verdict rail reports what purchasers bring; the Approach reports what vendors bring. The two populations differ, and the Bulletin states which it is reporting.

§10. Success Fee

10.1 Where a folio originating in an offer completes a sale, a success fee is payable by the vendor, at the rate disclosed and agreed in the mandate at the point of §6, and never varied afterwards.

10.2 The success fee is disclosed to the purchaser on enquiry. A fee the purchaser may not know of is a commission, and this Desk does not take commissions.

10.3 No success fee is payable on a parcel the Desk declined, lapsed, or did not publish.

§11. Data

11.1 Documents tendered on approach are personal data processed under the NDPA and the chambers' privacy notice, for the purpose of examination only.

11.2 Documents of declined and lapsed offers are retained for the period stated in the privacy notice and are not used for any other purpose, including market research beyond the anonymised defect tagging of §9.3.

11.3 No vendor's name, telephone number, or document appears on any public page of this site at any stage of the approach.

§12. Amendment

Amended only by successor version issued under the Principal's hand, with a change log. No silent edits. The version in force is recited on the approach page.

Land Desk by Magaji Law · LD/SPEC.005 v1.0 · An offer is not a folio, and nothing offered is published.