Anyone on here ever pivot from being litigation associate (practice areas like insurance defense/general litigation) to running solo practice focusing on transactional matters like real property, trusts and estates, etc? Pros/cons/challenges?

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I was a deputy prosecutor for five years and then went into estate planning/elder law for seven years before opening my own firm last year as a solo doing estate planning/elder law. It can be a difficult switch from litigation to transactional work.

As a litigator you are looking at making everything absolutely perfect. In transactional law (depending on the area you practice) the client’s timeline may not have time for perfection. You may be willing to pull an all nighter but your client who has to work in tandem with you may be less eager for that. So, it is a careful balancing of “here is the best action, but this is what the timeline realistically permits. He are the pluses and minuses of the ideal plan versus what may happen in this case if you stray from the ideal. How do you want to proceed?” Estate work is less like that unless someone is about to pass away and needs a Will, etc. but some elder law work involving government benefits is very time sensitive.

It can also be difficult to switch from a billing mindset to an efficiency mindset. There is no incentive to be efficient when you bill by the hour. There is every incentive to be efficient when you bill a flat fee. But, you still have to be accurate. So, efficiencies must constantly be monitored to make sure they are still appropriate for ever evolving circumstances.


If there is a litigation side and transactional side of the firm then there may be disagreements over allocation of resources for efficiency because the litigation side sees no benefit in that.

Having a litigation background can be hugely beneficial in the transactional world because you will naturally think of the worst case scenario developing down the line and try to shore up your client’s case against that (and document everything just in case).

Many transactional people do not want to do litigation. So, if you can do both then you can handle those really messy transactional cases no one else wants to touch where both sides “appear” to be united but it is clear as day that they are both going to need separate counsel and will probably end up suing each other. But, it can be VERY hard to run a combo litigation/transaction firm on your own. The litigation deadlines and court appearances have a tendency to interfere with the transaction deadlines. So, I only handle transactional law even though I wouldn’t mind doing some litigation based on transactional matters gone bad.

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