Structuring Transactions : The Case of Real Estate Finance (Revised version: March 2008)

A question often posed but rarely satisfactorily answered is: what do lawyers do? In this paper we take the work of real estate finance lawyers and examine how they structure transactions within the cross-border context. For the analysis the key term is structure as it is this that determines the success or failure of a transaction. This places the lawyer in an analogous position to the architect in a construction project. We provide examples of transactions and how they are articulated. This paper is co-authored by a practitioner and an academic