Entrepreneur seeks Superstar Real Estate & Business Attorney – Work/Life Balance

Posted March 14th, 2008 by fci

Are you a superstar attorney who wants the chance to have a real impact on business results while maintaining a work/life balance? No 70-hour weeks; no “billable hour minimums”; no emergency projects.

Position Highlights:

In-house attorney position for entrepreneurial investor involved in real estate and private equity.
Work/life balance, flexible hours, predictable work schedule.
Opportunity to also work on business/investment (non-legal) projects.
Must be superstar attorney; others need not apply.
Real estate law background required.
We expect outstanding work; otherwise extremely casual atmosphere and no politics.
We encourage referrals; a referral reward may be paid.

We are a privately owned, entrepreneurial investment firm involved in stocks, real estate, and the creation of new business ventures. We have a superb long term track record of finding and creating investments which are “high reward” with controlled risk. But we are not one of the many high-flying private equity firms or hedge funds that dot today’s landscape. We’re a small firm, just “doing our thing”, managing far less capital than these other firms. We’re not well known (we like it that way), we enjoy our work (business is our game; golf is boring), we value time with our families, we think we have good senses of humor, and we hope to be doing this same thing for another 40 years.

We seek to hire a true superstar attorney – with an emphasis in real estate law -- who fits in with our culture of doing outstanding work while maintaining a reasonable work/life balance. While this position offers lower stress, fewer hours, and a controllable work schedule (that is, no calls at 5pm requiring you to work until midnight), we will not be settling for a “merely good” lawyer. We view legal work as a key strategic matter; we cannot compromise on the quality of our in-house attorney. See our definition of “superstar” below.

A large portion of your job will involve negotiation and drafting of documents related to real estate deals, and a material portion of your job could (depending on the breadth of your talents and interests, and our needs at any given time) involve participation in critical non-legal business issues that make or lose us money.

Our Business and Your Role in It:

We are currently devoting most of our focus to a chain of specialty retail stores, where we are in the early phases of expanding from our current 10 stores to possibly 200+ stores over a long period of time (we’re not going to expand fast and screw it up). In this venture, we do not simply rent space in strip centers, but instead we purchase land and construct our own buildings, and sometimes also purchase existing facilities from competitors. The legal aspects include negotiating and drafting documents related to: land purchases, municipal and developer approvals, selling off or developing excess land, contracts with architects and general contractors, joint venture / licensing arrangements with third parties, and various financing arrangements.
We think we’re developing a competitive advantage in retail operating skills, and in site selection. So, we also hope to expand into additional specialty retail businesses over time.
Totally separately from our retail businesses, we have a history of purchasing various types of assets (real estate and securities) from distressed sellers. That business is far more competitive than it used to be, and we don’t spend much time on it anymore, but the timing is good right now to find assets like this, as the credit crunch worsens. When we do this, legal aspects could involve asset purchase agreements, bankruptcy matters, lending matters, etc. However, one of our huge problems is that we have many more potential projects than we have the time and energy to pursue, and we don’t do anything without analyzing it extremely thoroughly, so it’s an unknown as to whether we’ll have time to seriously pursue distressed opportunities in the near future.
Depending on your skills and interests, your non-legal projects could involve assisting in business strategy brainstorming, researching and pursuing investment or business acquisitions, pursuing financing for ventures, etc. We’re open to how that evolves, but to be clear, please don’t think that this will evolve into a role where your legal projects become only a small part of the job – they will likely remain significant, and that’s very important to us.
Our Definition of Superstar Attorney

Based on verifiable schooling, test scores, and employer and client reviews, you’re in the top 10% of all real estate / business attorneys when measuring the following traits in combination:

Raw intelligence and critical thinking skills
Legal knowledge and drafting skills
Attention to detail
Ability to see the big picture
Impact on client’s bottom line

Note that we do not include “number of billable hours” in this definition. We’re more interested in demonstrated quality than quantity. If you’re a superstar, most likely you worked really long hours for a long period of time. But you may have reached a point some time ago where you still wanted to do a really great job, but work wasn’t the only thing you wanted out of life, so you dialed back on your hours worked. And that’s OK with us. Plus, the reverse isn’t true anyway -- there are many people who make up for shortfalls in talent by simply working really hard their whole lives – and we’re not looking for those people.

Elaboration on Certain Key Attributes:

Required: You are very, very thorough and detail oriented. You’re constantly thinking about all the legal angles that can benefit us or harm us. And you pride yourself on accuracy and do not tolerate even small errors in your documents – in fact, your documents are so clean you can eat off of them. You don’t mind double-checking all your work, all the time – and you’re not into taking shortcuts. We always emphasize quality over speed. This detail orientation cannot be stressed enough, and here’s why: We attribute much of our above average investment results to our discipline of exploring many options, out-thinking most people, minimizing our own mistakes and catching other people’s mistakes, and being more thorough than our competitors – in both legal and non-legal matters. In particular, our CEO has caught many errors by other lawyers (because he reads and thinks about every word in relevant legal documents), which has worked to his investment advantage, time and again. You can be sure that our CEO will be very involved initially with your drafting, making sure you understand his approach, and double checking every one of your documents until you prove that he doesn’t need to do that anymore, at which time there will be a massive celebration at the office (and subsequently, an extended period of mourning if you retire).
Required: You are able to connect details to big picture. We know a lot of smart people who are good with details, but seem to have no natural judgment – they don’t seem to see the big picture. They don’t make good “next step” decisions. They get bogged down in the details and thus waste time on unimportant matters and/or go down blind alleys. So while we emphasize details and thoroughness, we also seek practicality – being able to distinguish between important and unimportant details.
Required: You are still hungry to deliver outstanding results despite making the conscious choice to step off the big law firm billable hour grind. You’re really attracted to the idea of having more impact on the final outcome, and you like the idea of being exposed to a lot of new ideas and challenges.

Not Required but Preferable: You are good at persuading and negotiating, preferably “live”. Obviously, in both the legal and non-legal realms, there is always a lot of negotiating and persuading to do. Great persuaders can make a big difference in the outcome of transactions – not only improving terms but also decreasing costs. An example of the latter is the typical contract negotiation process, whereby lawyers send redline drafts back and forth -- wherever possible, we prefer the style of picking up the phone, going over the points with opposing counsel, being persuasive as to why our points should be fair and acceptable to him, and trying to otherwise quickly resolve any differences. If you can do this along with creating accurate and thorough documents, you’re a big asset.

Not Required but Preferable: Your intellectual skills extend to math as well. In the investment business, you’re at a disadvantage if you can’t process numbers pretty quickly and accurately in your head.

Not Required but Preferable: You’re a loyal, stable person who hopes to settle down into a long term position. We do not foresee any slow-down in our need for a great attorney, and we expect to put a lot of effort into building an effective working relationship with you, so continuity is very, very important to us. For the right candidate, we hope that this will be a very long term position.

Elaboration on Education and Experience:

Required: You have your J.D. from a well regarded law school (or perhaps a lesser known school if you graduated at the top of your class), plus very strong grades and test scores.
Required: You have substantial commercial real estate legal experience, as this is the most important type of legal background required for the position.
Not Required but Preferable: Your undergraduate education was in business, accounting, finance, etc.
Not Required but Preferable: You have meaningful experience in other business legal areas, since our investments can cross over into multiple areas. Such areas would include some combination of the following:
1. Banking and finance
2. Bankruptcy
3. Mergers and Acquisitions
4. Private Equity
5. Franchise
6. Corporate/Partnership
7. Securities
8. Business Litigation

Reduced or Flexible Work Hours Possible

For your information, we probably average 50-55 hour work weeks ourselves. Never 70 or 80. And we don’t travel much, so we’re home for dinner every night. Plus, our work is fun; it’s like a hobby. Overall, this gives us a good work/life balance. But we recognize that there are some extremely talented people who do not wish to work even 40 hours per week. Thus, we’re flexible as to the average number of hours you wish to work, as long as you think you can average at least 30 hours per week. Compared to the 55-hour per week attorney, the 30-hour per week attorney will just make less money and probably get fewer non-legal projects to work on. But we’re flexible about this – we simply intend to hire the strongest candidate without regard to the average number of hours you wish to work.

Location, Compensation and Other Benefits

We’re located in the Dallas, Texas metro area. Dallas has a very low cost of living, very affordable housing, and no state income taxes. Roughly speaking, if you’re making $180,000 in Boston, you’ll live equivalently at $125,000 in Dallas.
Our office is in an upscale building in the Las Colinas area, but our dress code is very casual and the offices are kind of messy (we don’t have clients to impress). You can stop buying new suits and subsidizing dry cleaners.
This is not a structured environment and each person largely sets his own hours. (As such, self-management and excellent time management skills are a must.) Nobody punches a time clock, and generally we don’t care when you do your work, or whether you do some portion of your work at home.
So, to summarize, it’s cheap to live here and work here. And if you’re really good, you should experience great job satisfaction from an opportunity to do varied and important work that has a direct impact on business outcomes, while working reasonable and predictable hours in a casual environment. You’ll be the envy of all your lawyer friends.
Compensation is negotiable, depending on your qualifications and the approximate number of hours you’d like to work. But realize that we don’t manage as much capital as our competitors and we don’t put demands on our people like they do either. So we’re looking for the superstar attorney who places great value on the non-dollar benefits we offer, in which case we think you’ll be quite happy with the compensation. But if you enjoy a standard high-stress, high-billable-hour law firm position, you should stay there because you’ll make more money there.

Next Step

Interested in finding out more? Please email your resume and cover letter to fci.recruiting@gmail.com. Of course, we will not contact your current employer without your permission.

Referrals

We reward referrals! If you know a superstar who would be perfect for this position (even if such person is happily employed or otherwise not looking for work), we’d love to talk to him/her. You might earn a $5,000 referral reward. Read the following rules carefully; there will be no exceptions to these rules:

There will only be one hire for this position and therefore a maximum of only one $5000 referral fee paid.
Referrers should not contact us directly. Candidates must include the referrer’s name and contact information in the candidate’s initial cover letter to us.
The reward will be paid to the referrer of the candidate who is hired, in two installments: $2500 when the candidate completes the first six months of employment and $2500 when the candidate completes the first full year of employment. No reward will be paid if the candidate does not complete six months of employment for any reason (including termination). Only a $2500 total reward will be paid if the candidate completes six months, but does not complete 12 months of employment for any reason (including termination).

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