r/treelaw

Hi folks. This is a follow-up to ‘Neighbor had no idea where the property lines are, and cut down my healthy 89-year-old oak because he didn't like trees being near his shed’, which unexpectedly blew up on this sub. The tl;dr is that in July 2024, a careless neighbor trespassed into my property to cut down a nearly hundred year old healthy oak. He did this because he felt it threatened his shed (it didn’t) and he had no idea where the property lines were and didn’t bother to check, then demanded we split the $2,000 he paid to have it cut down. A lot of people requested follow-up, but I wanted to wait until the situation was fully resolved, which ended up taking a lot longer than anticipated.

My wife and I were both pretty upset about the situation and hit the ground running from day 1. We retained a lawyer specializing in tree law, who advised we solicit a property survey to confirm the location of the tree. This ended up taking nearly two months due to a local shortage of surveyors, and unsurprisingly conclusively demonstrated that the tree was well within the bounds of our property by about fifty feet.

While waiting on that, we hired a TPAQ-certified arborist to examine the stump and photos we provided of the tree pre-cutting. His appraisal was that the tree was healthy at the time of cutting, and assessed a replacement value based on Trunk Formula Technique at $11.8K.

However, in my state the replacement value is not considered the basis for damages. Instead, damages for commercially grown trees are three times the value of the lumber, while for residential trees the recognized damages are the reduction in property value as a result of the trespass. Our lawyer provided a recommendation for a home appraiser to determine this value.

I explored a few other possibilities based on my research and suggestions on this sub. In no particular order:

• We filed a police report, but since it was not a malicious act, they simply dismissed it as a civil matter.
• Our homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover trees on the property, so filing a claim with them was off the table.
• Our mortgage lender was unconcerned with the reduction in value of the property.
• Our neighbor’s homeowner’s insurance wouldn’t cover him, since it was a deliberate (if negligent) act.
• Legal precedent would not support going after the tree service for damages either, since it was our neighbor who engaged their services.
• The fees involved in the survey, arborist appraisal, home appraisal, and lawyer’s fees would not be recoverable. The only damages we could seek would be that loss in property value.

Which just left suing our neighbor for the reduction in property value. By November 2024 we had an appraisal in hand, asserting a loss in value of about $10K. Our lawyer wrote and sent a demand letter, which received no immediate response. After repeated attempts at follow up, and seeing my neighbor walking around his property with a surveyor (now he cares where the property line is), we finally got a response from our neighbor’s lawyer in February 2025.

The response basically asserted that the tree was dead and ‘hollowed out’, that it was on some forgotten corner of the property and therefore worthless, and that it was an innocent mistake by my neighbor so oopsie-daisy not his problem.

This pissed me off.

My lawyer thought this response indicated that my neighbor’s lawyer recognized he had no case, so called him to see if they could hash things out over the phone. Neighbor’s lawyer was apparently dismissive, clearly out of his element with tree law (it seems his specialty is tenant law), and hung up on my lawyer.

This made my lawyer rather upset, and consequently highly motivated to pursue the case further as a matter of defending his professional integrity. As general life advice I would highly recommend not antagonizing lawyers.

So, my lawyer sent a follow-up letter breaking down every point of the defense and why it’s nonsense, and included the arborist appraisal and photos that I took the day-of, which clearly showed that the tree was healthy and that the claim that it was dead and hollow was bullshit.

My neighbor, and his lawyer, didn’t reply. So at this point- nearly a year after the actual incident- we finally filed a lawsuit. And this… still didn’t seem to spur my neighbor into taking it any more seriously.

The court system did its thing, slow as ever, and by fall assigned us a court date for summer 2026. Then there was a whole lot of radio silence until lo and behold, come February, my neighbor must have realized that he was actually going to court for a lawsuit he was unlikely to win. Suddenly he wanted to negotiate, offering a very generous $2K.

Hah hah lol no. We began actual negotiation and the number started to rise. Apparently, my neighbor was yelling at his lawyer by this point. Eventually, we settled on $7K. I was a bit disappointed by this, but my lawyer gently explained that going to court would mean more billable hours, plus having to pay for the time of our expert witnesses (surveyor, arborist, and appraiser), plus any additional fees that would go into actually extracting the money from this moron if/when we won, and those would eat up the difference even assuming the judge fully sided with us.

At this point our total expenses were just under $5K out of pocket, so we would still come out ahead. There was some additional nonsense with our neighbor asking to pay in installments, but in the end our lawyer received all payment and it cleared to our trust account. So in total it took nearly two years, many hours of emails and phone calls, and almost $5K out of pocket to ultimately receive a $7K settlement for an appraised $10K of damages.

And that’s where this ends. It was a lot of time and effort to ultimately walk away with a fraction of the damage done. There’s a hole in the treeline that I don’t care for, a depressing stump where that huge oak used to be, and a neighbor who I can only hope has learned some lesson. Either way I’ve built a rope fence that careless workers can’t ignore as readily as property markers, but doesn’t restrict the movement of animals through the neighborhood. I like seeing deer and foxes and trees around me, thank you very much.

You read about the karmic justice cases where someone gets a six-figure payout, but from my research I gather most cases of tree law go more like this. Most trees just aren’t that valuable outside of exceptional circumstances or treble damages, and it takes a lot of money to actually engage the legal system to force an outcome. My wife and I are very fortunate to be in a position where we could afford to spend so much out of pocket in the hopes of getting repaid at some unspecified point in the future. A lot of people don’t have that luxury, and unfortunately that means little recourse in a situation like this.

I’d like to share a comment I found during my initial research. As I was reading so many comments on my previous post setting one-month reminders and certain that I was about to receive a massive payout, this was one that stayed on my mind.

“I want to manage your expectations. Most of the time tree law isn’t like bylaw. You can’t call someone and they’ll issue a fine for your neighbour to pay you. Instead, you would usually call and pay for a consulting arborist to come and evaluate the loss of the tree and replacement cost, then you would hire a lawyer and pursue your neighbour for the cost to replace the tree. It would likely take months or years. You will need to pay out of pocket for the consulting arborist and the lawyer, as I doubt anyone would take it on contingency. You can attempt to be made whole through the civil court system, but it’s not quick. And it will destroy your quiet enjoyment of your property. 

This sub can be great because you learn about how people receive huge amounts of compensation in treble damages states. The reality, though, is that litigation is very costly and very stressful.”

Spot on. Do I regret the decisions that brought us to this point? Hell no. If our neighbor hadn’t been such a blithering idiot by denying responsibility at every step along the way, we could have resolved his error with more money in both our pockets and his. He instead, after being proud of having 'only' spent $2K to have the tree unnecessarily cut down, chose to end up paying an additional $8-10K between the settlement, survey, and legal fees of his own. Sucks to suck.

In summation: Neighbor cut down our tree. Neighbor demanded we pay him $1K for doing it. Neighbor had a Lawyer Experience instead. Neighbor paid us $7K, we walked away with a bit over $2K after expenses.

If you read this far, thanks for bearing with me. I've got a plane to catch, but if anyone has questions I’ll try to answer them when I can.

I know no pictures DOSENT help: I have about 7 pines taller then my 2 story house 2 honeylocusts (also huge) about 10 well established forsynthia bushes (remaining) about 100' of many many sporrea plants creating a border 2 recently planted serviceberry 7? Well established juniper bushes a cherry tree (montmorency) an apple tree (honey crisp) a pear tree (also very established) and multiple mulberry "plants" varying sizes/ages

I got something from the city as much as saying "level the property to 8" or less" so I want some thought of the "value" so I can throw that at the city when they start being stupid

This city (Kenosha) thinks "milkweed" is a "weed" along with many other natives and beneficals

I’m posting to get some advice possible on this situation. This lady who lives across the street has decided to just start planting apple trees on this property across the street from her home. I am the landscaper and find it somewhat ignorant to do something like this. Then she trims the branches and leaves them on the ground. Is it normal for people to just plant trees on property they don’t own?

My neighbor, who is constantly trimming trees and cutting them down just messaged me she is having an arborist come out and trim the 3 trees on my fence line that hang into her yard. I’m talking maybe two feet at best. Does she expect me to pay half? There was no discussion or anything.

Do you as a property owner still have freedom to poison trees which are or may be connected to neighbors' trees without legal liability?

I've been in this house (first time homeowner) for 2 years now. About a year in, we had a tree in our backyard that had some rotting limbs. One started to rot and slowly one morning started to lay down toward the neighbor's house. Some small branches were starting to touch his roof, which he had recently redone. He was scared, understandably, and wanted us to take action immediately. My wife and I want to be good neighbors, so we called a tree guy we know and he came out within 30 minutes. He said it would be $600. At least in our state, because the branch is in his property now, it is technically our neighbor's problem to deal with, but again, we want to be understanding people, so we agreed to split the cost.

Fast forward about 3 months, a large tree in his yard lost a large limb in a storm and it landed out my truck. I loved that truck. Old (ish), 2013, but reliable. It had 165k miles and I was confident it was going another 100k. Plus I had done some small modifications to it, so I just really liked the truck. Anyway, it was totaled. Obviously, I talked to the neighbor to try to come up with a similar solution as before when we were generous to him. We were hoping he would be willing to use his homeowner's insurance to help with the cost or something like that. He just said he wished he could help, but he couldn't. I asked him, do you see the irony here? I just helped you with a tree and now we can't even have a conversation about this? Used my own car insurance for a less than I'd hoped for payout and had to move on.

I need a vehicle for work, so we went out and bought a new to me truck. It's a 2024 F150, so it was very expensive still, but I just figured that although I didn't want an upgrade, maybe this could be my new "forever" vehicle. We would have strongly preferred to upgrade my wife's vehicle first, but that was sort of taken from us. I told him he really should get the tree taken down and he agreed that he should because he said he has lost a few other limbs over the years (information that would have helped us possibly make a claim against his insurance if he had been more forthcoming originally).

8 months go by and the tree is still there. This week a big storm came through again and guess what? Another tree branch fell and hit my new truck. Fortunately, this time it fell a little short and hit our basketball hoop first, so the damage is "minor." But here's the question, what do I do?

Damage- scratches scattered from front driver side panel, both doors, truck bed panel scratches, two small windshield cracks, and two small dents that I can see so far. The scratches are kind of all over.

Because of the widespread, but relatively small in themselves damages, I just don't know how to even go about repair or making the situation right. This time, he said he wanted to make it right. I'm not quite sure at this time what that means, but where do you even start? Such systemic small damage can add up to be a lot of money. This truck only has 8k miles on it and was in brand new condition. I feel like if this damage was done to my old truck, I would much more easily shrug it off as things happen over time. But to a new truck? I don't even know where to start.

Thanks for any help you may have to offer!

For the last 10 years my neighbor has been filing applications to remove 12 large protected trees from his backyard that are obstructing his views. The city repeatedly denied each application on multiple environmental reasons. He has always joked about "paying some illegals" to cut the trees down at night.

three weeks ago some bad actor coincidentally cut down the exact 12 trees while the family was on vacation in Mexico. He did file a police report for vandalism immediately apon their return but refuses to cooperate with law enforcement past that. Everybody knows he is behind it and walks around with a smug look on his face.

Its kind of a big neighborhood story and the police cant file charges due to lack of evidence. Is he going to get away with this one?

The property behind us is undeveloped and ridden with Siberian elms. There are approved plans to have it developed into apartments so I know eventually they will probably remove the trees but for now, it’s a total pain. We and our next door neighbors have both have one of the trees drop a massive limb into our yards. His shed got smashed and while we’ve been lucky to miss anything big, today a huge limb fell and crushed about 6 trees I had planted. We also just had someone out to measure our yard for a fence install, and this makes me very hesitant paying for a fence when limbs are still falling. We’ve had the elms on our property removed or trimmed but since it’s just an empty lot right now, the property owners aren’t really over there and probably have no idea that they have an elm problem. Is there anything I can do? The trees look healthy-ish but the species is notorious for being unstable. I’m paying someone today to come cut and remove the one that fell but I don’t want to be trapped paying for someone else’s tree negligence. I have no idea if the company that owns the land is local or whether they’d write this off as not being worth their time. This is in Virginia, by the way. Any advice is welcomed, thanks!