Attorneys and Real Estate Transactions

First of all, lest you think I'm going to trash attorneys, let me assure you that I have good friends who are attorneys! The rest of this post is the "however"!

My interactions with attorneys have always been negative. Notice I said "always". I don't use the word lightly!

In part, it is, of course, the nature of the attorney's role. Attorneys advocates for their clients and that usually seems to end up meaning they take adversarial positions. And while that sounds like exactly what you'd want, someone aggressively fighting for your interests, that's not exactly always true. For example, a good guard dog will protect you and warn you of intruders. But if a guard dog treats every visitor to your home as a threat to life and limb and attacks viciously, that's not good! Attorneys often pursue getting you the "win" over getting you what you really want. I don't necessarily blame that on the individual attorneys. That's how they were trained. And, many clients aren't all that good at communicating what we really want!

Some attorneys also seem to be more interested in justifying their fees than in getting their clients the house they want or the sale they need. They can take a standard contract that's worked pefectly well for millions of transactions and convince a client that they need to insert special language to protect them. This is very, very, very rarely necessary! (By the way, these standard contracts were put together over years time, using untold scores of attorneys!)

Attorneys, at least in this area, are most often generalists. They work on real estate but certainly not exclusively. I see a lot more real estate contracts than most attorneys do. That doesn't make me a legal expert. But it does make me a real estate contract expert.

Attorneys who don't view this as their main source of income often don't treat it as the tremendously important event it is to the client. I've had an attorney call within a week of settlement and say he forgot to mention that he was on vacation and his office would be closed on the day we were supposed to settle! And, it can take days to get an attorney to review a contract, even when it is a standard contract with very little in the way of revisions.

So, my advice to my clients is always to use a settlement company rather than an attorney. Settlement companies do this for a living and they take each deal very seriously.

I've had this point driven home to me again this week when an attorney became involved in a contract negotiation for a client. Suddenly a client who still believes in deals done with a handshake is worried she needs a whole new contract to protect her interests because the one that the buyers presented, according to her attorney, is incredibly biased towards the buyers. I'm now spending a lot of time pouring oil on troubled waters.

Lastly, I've had several clients after settlement say that they should have used a settlement company rather than an attorney. I've never had anyone tell me the reverse!