re: Masters in Finance, Law School, or MBA in 3-4 years?

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Well, for example, finance savvy lawyers may use a DCF to value a company just as a finance professional would. The only real difference is the audience. In the legal you're just pitching your valuation to the judge or to an appraiser as opposed to a banker or an institutional client or what have you.

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Lawyers really do this? I mean that's basically what I do right now, and 100% of my engagements come from lawyers. If the lawyers are doing this in big markets, what are IB consulting arms doing? That blows my mind, and I still don't know how someone could do that without heavy experience in a finance capacity, especially with Daubert and whatnot. eta: Do most big city corp lawyers also have MBAs and experience to fall back on? My buddy has a CPA and is extremely bright, I wouldn't trust her to do a full blown valuation though.

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In providing a company with a poison pill provision, you are advising them on share structure issues, on rights offerings issues, on conversion, redeemability, etc., etc.

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My friend does a good bit of this. Its really not financial though, its more like shareholder rights issues.

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A law school corporate finance textbook ... you'd probably understand most of it more than most law students

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Not to sound conceited, but I sure hope so.

If I were 21 ( I wiah ) and wanted to study Law, I would choose Intellectual Property Law. Great niche and there will be plenty of work in the future.

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The stuff you mentioned is primarily what I think of when I think of corporate lawyer work. Not financial work per se, but the legal documents that go along with transactional work.

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Another difference is what the attorney helps the client in negotiating/advising. The corporate and securities negotiates/advises M&A and active investments, whereas a corporate finance attorney may negotiate or advise financing opportunities or passive investments. There can be significant overlap, depending on the size of the market, but the attorney can get into financial aspects when the details of the deal are being ironed-out or the client is pursuing multiple opportunities.

I'm just having trouble reconciling why someone would need, say, GS to advise on a deal, if they already hired Weil Gotshal as well. It seems like they always hire both whenever I read about deals. If the attorneys are doing that much financial work, what are the investment bankers doing? I would imagine both sides have opposite answers.

Totally unrelated but I'm reading a GT doc about M&A in Q1, and this one section is written by: Ari Goldschneider.

I hear you. I can tell you for certain, at least in nola (which is clearly not nyc but is certainly filled with lawyers), our attorney clients don't know what a balance sheet is, which of course, is why they hire us. The PV example I can understand, that's pretty straightforward so long as you can justify your discount rate.

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I'm just having trouble reconciling why someone would need, say, GS to advise on a deal, if they already hired Weil Gotshal as well. It seems like they always hire both whenever I read about deals. If the attorneys are doing that much financial work, what are the investment bankers doing? I would imagine both sides have opposite answers.

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All of this stuff runs together. The bankers probably know a bunch of the legal stuff. The lawyers know a bunch of the finance stuff. Everyone's working together. It's not like as the deal goes down it's just clearly packaged where you have the bankers come in and do their gig and then the lawyers come in and do theirs and so on. It's just the nature of law that it encroaches a lot on other fields.

Do you really need to go to a real estate agent for advice if you've got a highly competent real estate attorney in the room?

Do you really need to go to an insurance agent for advice if you've got a highly competent insurance attorney in the room?

Do you really need to go to an accountant for advice if you've got a highly competent tax attorney in the room?

It also depends on which area of law you're practicing in. If you're corporate counsel or something, your knowledge is probably better described as being a inch deep but a mile wide whereas if you're a patent attorney your knowledge is an inch wide but a mile deep.

But with a highly specialized field such as IB, you're always going to have industry professionals out there whose knowledge runs much deeper than the lawyers, but it's also not like the lawyers just don't know anything about finance either. There's definitely an interplay between the bankers, the accountants, the attorneys, etc. Picture the Venn Diagram. You have some whose tasks are contained within their respective field but you also have others who fall in the middle of the diagram who are kind of capable of wearing multiple hats (with respect to the attorneys).

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Really? I thought that was just Patent law.

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How many IP lawyers do you know that exclusively do trademarks, trade secrets or copyrights work? Those are the unspecialized areas of IP law handled by litigation attorneys or patent attorneys. No specialization is required for those areas, in contrast to the niche/specialized field of patent law.

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our attorney clients don't know what a balance sheet is, which of course, is why they hire us. The PV example I can understand, that's pretty straightforward so long as you can justify your discount rate.

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There are a whole host of attorneys who don't know anything whatsoever about finance, economics, etc. In fact, on the first day of corporate law class, there were people who didn't even know the difference between an asset and a liability. But that's just one end of the spectrum. On the other end you've got some highly competent lawyers out there, many with dual degrees or with dual career experience.

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you also have the guys who don't qualify for patent law who do everything but

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I think those are the Howrey guys still looking for work. It's just not an overly complicated area, which means it's not much of a niche. Patent law is where you can develop a niche as an IP attorney.

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Go read a fairly involved patent. You'll want to go give yourself papercuts in between your toes. Believe me, it will be funner than reading the patent.

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Try billing 2,000 hours writing those patents. No out-of-office time, nothing but reading and writing all day.