We had an exciting week's end at Drexel Law. My colleague Karl Okamoto organized and pulled off a very cool new project: a transactional lawyering meet. In essence, it was a moot court tournament for students interested in doing deals. The competition was hard fought, featuring teams from BYU, Columbia, Cornell, Emory, Georgia, Indiana – Bloomington, Penn, Temple, Washington and Lee, and of course Drexel. Students were required to negotiate a deal involving a private equity group seeking to acquire an existing business. More details are in this article out today in the National Law Journal.
Kudos go to the teams from Indiana and Georgia who won "best overall". But kudos also go out to that burgeoning gang of law profs who have been working hard to amp up the profile of transactional lawyering within the law school curriculum. I could hardly have been less prepared for my first deal (and yes, I got my start in the corporate department) when I worked on my first leveraged leaseback of an aircraft back in the early 1990's.