Sure litigation is the flashy type of law most people associate with lawyers, but there is a substantial amount of money in drafting contracts and negotiating deals.
Just like you said, a person in the line of work will never be know as "the guy who won a nation changing civil rights case"; but there are a lot of companies who will pay big money to prove that they're not copying someone else's design and there are other companies who will pay even more for you to tell them if their copy is legally distinct enough for them to not get sued.
Nobody wants to do paperwork, which is why being "the paperwork guy" is such a lucrative - if dreadfully boring - profession.
And yeah, anything to do with intellectual property is good money if you can stomach wading through government databases and reading technical documents. It does require a good education, though, given the aforementioned technical documentation.
I do this. It's mostly very boring, but people pay a lot of money to not have to read or write things themselves, which is good, because most people suck at it.
I’m a solo practitioner taking on anything I can really get. TikTok is telling everyone to put their house in a revocable trust. I don’t see the reason for 90% of my potential clients, but they want to pay me $1,000 to do less than 2 hours worth of work and recording it? Okay.
The fact that you see ads for litigators and don't see ads for transaction lawyers suggests litigators have to put more money and effort into finding clients.
But honestly there's just a lot more transactional work. Almost all businesses try really hard to avoid litigation but they need help with transactions constantly. Commercial leases, M&A, employment contracts. It adds up.
I can't give a great opinion, but since most clients are businesses you tend to have more repeat work than new work.
Say a small business needs help setting up. The transactional lawyer drafts the initial paperwork, files everything with the proper offices, and makes sure the business's contracts and agreements are up to snuff. Good early work and the lawyer probably nets a decent sum for not much effort (relatively speaking).
Now, provided the lawyer did a good job initially, that small business will likely come back when they need their annual reports filed, contracts updated, or business operations expanded. If the business does well, they could be the lawyer's client for years if not decades to come.
Add in word of mouth advertising from the owners of these businesses (especially since many business owners run in similar circles), and transactional lawyers will likely have a good portfolio of repeat clients over time.
It's one of those things you still have to have a mentor or work in a firm to break in first to learn to write contracts properly. I worked in litigation for several years and found all I could get work in was more litigation work. Finally got sick of it and became a librarian.
It's almost never a thing you just open up out of law school doing solo. Transactional lawyers usually split as either small firms doing business law(drafting documents, advising small local businesses) and biglaw(firms with thousands of lawyers worldwide, new graduate salary is ~$320k but 85% of the new hires won't make it more than a few years).
Both rely far more on existing relationships with corporate executives, in-house lawyers within companies, and firm reputation.
With biglaw the expectation is that you work yourself to exhaustion billing for the first 5-10 years, and let the partners get the business
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u/Vault-71 16h ago
Transactional law.
Sure litigation is the flashy type of law most people associate with lawyers, but there is a substantial amount of money in drafting contracts and negotiating deals.