Modulator

A Lawyer is a Lawyer is a Lawyer

Right?

Well, no, not exactly. We all read about trial lawyers, district attorneys, attorney generals, defense lawyers, etc., and perhaps think we know all about lawyers. Most of us don't visit lawyers often if at all. We tend not to use them for our marriages, our real estate purchases, etc. Really, why would we want to waste money on a lawyer. Sometimes we are right. Other times we are wrong.

So what other kinds of lawyers are there besides the 'glamorous' ones listed above. There are the transactional lawyers. The what? Well, I scratched my head over that for a long time and finally got my head wrapped around it a year or so ago when I realized that I had worked with many transactional lawyers and just hadn't correctly applied the label. They all did this:

...write contracts that protect our clients when things go wrong.

Scheherazade writes a lot more about what it means to be a transactional lawyer and you should go read it all. I particularly enjoyed this part:

The part that's not fun is the chronic suspicion you have of everyone else, and what turns into a constant tug-of-war between trying to draft the contract so your own client has free rein to be as big of a son-of-a-bitch as he/she/it wants while the other side gets hamstrung if they stop being sweetness and light. I can see why businesspeople don't want to cultivate that particular sharp imaginative ability, and outsource it instead to us.

Via Professor Bainbridge who adds to Margaret's discussion:

Perhaps my main disagreement with her comments is that they doesn't sufficiently stress the role of regulatory arbitrage - figuring out how to structure a deal so that the size of the pie expands for everybody (her analysis focuses mainly on pie division). In addition, good transactional lawyers also devote attention to the question of thinking about how the contract incentivizes good behavior on the part of both their client and the other side.

Transactional lawyers will be an important part of any future free society (read unencumbered by inefficient and oppressive gov't regulations).

Posted by Steve on March 3, 2004