Real Estate Transactions vs. M&A Forum
Forum rules
Anonymous Posting
Anonymous posting is only appropriate when you are revealing sensitive employment related information about a firm, job, etc. You may anonymously respond on topic to these threads. Unacceptable uses include: harassing another user, joking around, testing the feature, or other things that are more appropriate in the lounge.
Failure to follow these rules will get you outed, warned, or banned.
Anonymous Posting
Anonymous posting is only appropriate when you are revealing sensitive employment related information about a firm, job, etc. You may anonymously respond on topic to these threads. Unacceptable uses include: harassing another user, joking around, testing the feature, or other things that are more appropriate in the lounge.
Failure to follow these rules will get you outed, warned, or banned.
-
crickyb
- Posts: 1
- Joined: Thu Aug 13, 2015 11:31 am
Real Estate Transactions vs. M&A
When it comes to large-firm transactional work, what are the major differences in the life/daily tasks of a RE Transactions attorney vs. a M&A attorney? Thanks in advance for your responses.
-
Rlabo
- Posts: 531
- Joined: Fri Jan 04, 2013 4:18 am
Re: Real Estate Transactions vs. M&A
From my understanding (mostly from ppl who practice in real estate — I'm sec lit, so could be wrong), they are very different, if not polar opposite. M&A is a practice revolved around the new and Real Estate revolves around the familiar. In M&A, you are learning the ins and outs of new companies on each deal, which can be vastly different (eg energy company v pharmaceutical). In a real estate deal, a building is a building is a building (land use is a little more tricky/legal based). Instead, your dealing with the small real estate community, which tends to be very relationship based. The deal is not the complicated part but rather the relationships involved. Over time, you get to know who the big players are how the industry world. That doesn't exist nearly to the same degree in M&A. So it depends what you're interested in — learning something new every day and being able to adapt, or having a stable foundation and a community that you grow into.
As far as day to day, any firm is gonna have you billing ~50hours/week (2400/year). From my limited understanding, M&A hours tend to be the worst of almost any practice area as deals can and do come up out of nowhere and clients expect the work to be down yesterday do to anonymity issues (especially in hostile takeover scenarios). I wouldn't say real estate doesn't have that but I would think its not to that degree. That being said, every practice area has peaks and valleys, I just think M&A tends to have more that most.
As far as day to day, any firm is gonna have you billing ~50hours/week (2400/year). From my limited understanding, M&A hours tend to be the worst of almost any practice area as deals can and do come up out of nowhere and clients expect the work to be down yesterday do to anonymity issues (especially in hostile takeover scenarios). I wouldn't say real estate doesn't have that but I would think its not to that degree. That being said, every practice area has peaks and valleys, I just think M&A tends to have more that most.
