Course Section | Columbia Law School

Section Description Provided by Instructor

Grades are based on class participation, written assignments, and a group negotiation project.

Writing Credit TBD.

The Workshop explores the ways in which creating structures for all negotiated transactions (or "deals"), large and small, public and private, involve managing conflicts and behavior in the context of regulatory constraints and business goals. It shows how the types of behavior and conflicts that need to be successfully managed by a transactional lawyer can be grouped into a relatively small number of categories. These categories transcend both deal type and the realm of deals altogether, and are equally applicable to the problems faced by lawyers in other roles. The premise of the course is that the most important criteria of a good transactional lawyer is, first, an ability to understand the distinction between these categories and how real world problems fit into them, second, the ability to explain to a client what behavior and potential conflicts the deal needs to manage, and, third, the ability to understand how to use different provisions and techniques to create a structure where the participants in a deal can succeed.

The course looks at three real-life deals in detail, and uses these deals, a number of other real world examples, and the negotiation of a hypothetical deal to understand how successful lawyers structure complex transactions.