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0l here, considering doing transactional work after burning out as a paralegal in a litigation boutique.

I've read that it's difficult to find transactional work outside of biglaw, and that it can be difficult to find transactional jobs if you don't go to the t14. How true is this?

It does exist, but typically on much smaller deals. Small firms tend not to have the capacity to handle significant corporate transactions that are the bread and butter of biglaw because they need a lot of different subject matter experts and warm bodies to handle the sheer volume of work.

However, Small to mid-size businesses need legal counsel for deals as well that don't support biglaw rates and there are small and mid-size firms evolved to handle that work. Jobs at these firms will be a lot less plentiful compared to litigation at similar size firms.

It also depends what you mean by transactional. If you mean only traditional M&A/biglaw deals, maybe not. However, if you just mean "not litigation," there are a lot of government employees who handle things like contracting, procurement, real estate, licensing, utilities, and labor/employment issues, some of which will entail litigation-like work, but not usually in actual courts, more administrative boards.

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