A Baton Rouge personal injury attorney is suing LSU, claiming that university maintenance workers removed his advertising bench from a lonely stretch of bank along University Lakes.
Now, injury attorney Neil Sweeney and LSU are waging a property line dispute involving multiple lawsuits.
To back their claim over the lakeshore, and show Sweeney’s bench was on land he had no right to use, LSU cited a nearly 100-year-old property record in pretrial motions earlier this year.
In 1933, a Baton Rouge realty company donated land to the university so it could be turned into a public lake near campus.
Motorists can see the entirety of this donation, the northern tip of University Lake and entirety of Crest Lake, by driving down Dalrymple Drive where it bisects the two bodies of water.
From there, across the much-smaller Crest Lake, sits a shaded stretch of grassy land between the bank and July Drive. Sweeney’s ad bench sat there until LSU maintenance workers allegedly moved it in November 2024.
The strip of land, titled Lot Z in the 1933 donation documents, is contested between LSU and Southern Apartments, a company that owns a condominium along Crest Lake and is also represented by Sweeney.
In his lawsuit, Sweeney is seeking damages for the loss of the physical property as well as the loss of potential future advertising revenue it would have brought.
The suit, which was filed in October, is still in pretrial motions with its next hearing before Judge Ronald Johnson scheduled for May 27.
The case could potentially be affected by Attorney General Liz Murrill’s attempt to have three Baton Rouge judges, including Johnson, recuse themselves from any case before them in which her office might be counsel or a party to.
Litigation involving LSU’s ownership of land around the lakes has come before Baton Rouge judges in the past, but this latest property dispute began in 2020.
At the time, the Lake Crest Home Owners Association was in a legal dispute with Southern Apartments over relocating a servitude on Lot Z. LSU joined in, saying it actually owned Lot Z and should have been a party to the case.
Southern Apartments, represented by Sweeney, argued that Lot Z was not actually included in the 1933 land donation from the realty company, Caz Perk.
Instead, it was sold to Southern Apartments in a separate 1979 deal, they claim.
Sweeney, representing the apartment complex, also argued that the original 1933 donation from Caz Perk only gave LSU land up to the shoreline of the lakes at that moment in time. He cited minutes from a May 1933 meeting of the LSU Board of Supervisors.
In November 2024, a judge ruled in Southern Apartment’s favor, on the basis of “acquisitive prescription” where the complex gained the property because the complex believed it already owned the area and acted so for a period longer than 10 years.
LSU has appealed this decision, and is seeking to stay the trial over the advertising bench until the appeals court rules.
Reached for comment, Sweeney said a gag order from a separate trial kept him from commenting. The Attorney General’s Office, whose attorney is representing LSU in the “bench” trial, also did not provide comment Friday afternoon.
