​There is no need for me to go to law school

There is no need for me to go to law school

Let me be 100% clear here. I am not a lawyer but I provide partial employment to a herd of them. The reason that I pay lawyers is because they went to law school.

I could go to law school if I really wanted to go. I could sit in a classroom for the next three years. I could spend a year studying for the bar exam. I could spend years learning how to do transactions from a senior lawyer. I could do all of these things but there is exactly no reason for me to do any of it. Why is it a waste of time and money for me to go to law school because I can rent all of the legal knowledge in the world if I need legal work.

So what prompted this blog post today? I can’t exactly explain what caused this today exactly but I can tell you that I have considered writing this post for months if not years. It seems that nearly every new investor seems to be compelled to get themselves into the legal minutia of the real estate deals that we do.

Let me be clear with you, you really don’t need to know how a lot of this works at the minute detail level. You as the investor do need to understand the basics of the deal. You need to understand the key features of the deal. You need to be able to articulate the basics of the deal to your lawyer, then you need to sit back and let them do what they went to school to do. You do not need to be able to write your own contracts. I actually had a student ask me about the exact wording that allows the mortgage company to initiate a foreclosure against you if you don’t pay, I swear I didn’t make this up. You do not need to be able come up with all of the Latin and legalese words that usually appear on a contract.

In the real world, what you need to do is to call or send an email to your lawyer that says something to the effect that “I am buying 123 Main St, I am putting $1000 down, with a purchase price of $150,000, paid as $1000 per month for 149 months.”

Your lawyer will come back with a few questions. You can answer them, and let the lawyer take over.

There is a period where you actually do need to care about and look into the details of the transaction. We are not placing blind trust in our law school graduates. You do want to review the documents in details after your lawyer prepares them, but with ample time for corrections, before the closing. Then and only then you will want to read the entire document package in its entirety.

You need to change the way you view lawyers and the legal mechanisms that we use to buy, sell, rent, and control real estate. Lawyers are tools that you can use. The lawyer-tools create documents that allow you to do whatever you and the other party in the transaction agree to. Pay the lawyer to do what they do best and get on to negotiating the next deal.

To your success

Josh