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What Does a Corporate Lawyer Do & Do You Need One? - YouTube
Channel: Brett Cenkus
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Hi everyone, this is Brett Cenkus, the
right-brained business lawyer and business
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consultant. Today, I'm gonna build on a
video I did a couple years ago called,
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'what is a corporate lawyer?' It's a very
short video, 60 seconds and I hit at a
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very high level, what do corporate
lawyers do? That video has had a
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tremendous amount of attention and I
wanted to dive a little bit deeper today
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and talk a little bit more about, you
know, more granularly, what do corporate
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lawyers do? So, backing up though, going
back high-level, something you need to
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understand is in law school, well
number one, you would think, I am a
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corporate lawyer; you would think I would
have figured out what corporate lawyers
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do before I decided to pay six figures
and spend three years of my time going
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to get a law degree, but no I didn't. I
figured out what corporate lawyers do
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when I was in law school. So early on in
law school, you know, kind of midway
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through that first semester, second
semester, you know, first year you start
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talking about interviewing, what you want
to do. And all the students start to
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group into one of two broad categories,
for the most part, you've got litigators
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and corporate lawyers, okay? So litigators
go to court, they're the ones who always
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knew they wanted to be lawyers, they
watch Perry Mason,
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you know LA law, they watch these--Perry Mason, Im dating myself--but they
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watch they watch shows, where people
stand up and make arguments in court and
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that's what they want to do, they want to
go argue and fight and be you know
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they're well spoken on
their feet, they're really
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into the courtroom scene, okay?
The rest of us didn't really know why we
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were in law school, trying to figure out,
well I guess there's some reason I'm
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here and I know I don't want to go do
that I don't want to argue for a living. We end
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up being, you know, kind of slotting in as
corporate lawyers or what I call
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business lawyers or in another word is
transactional lawyers. We deal mainly in
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contracts. So we form companies, we work
through partner-founder agreements, you
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know, things like that. If you've been
watching my mastering business
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partnership video series you know that's
a lot of what I do. I help figure out
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what people's deal is, you know, here in the air and put it into a
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contract form. We merge companies
together, we help them raise capital. Our
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world isn't the world of courtrooms. I
do a little bit of dispute work with
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partners and founders and a tiny, tiny
little bit of litigation but really rarely
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more than most transactional lawyers, who
can go their whole
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career without going into court. So we
deal with contracts and litigators they
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go to court. There are other more niche
areas of law: there's bankruptcy, there's
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employment law, you know some employment
lawyers draft employment agreements, some
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argue them in court so they could be kind
of corporate and litigation,
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there's intellectual property, there's
all sorts of different hybrids and
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niches, but for the most part, you've got
corporate or business and transactional
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and you've got litigators. The thing
to know is that corporate lawyers are
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business generalists, for the most part.
We're usually the first call when
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someone's starting a company. We help
form that company, we help talk about how
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to structure it, things like that. Most
or a lot of business, corporate lawyers
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are business-people trapped in lawyers
bodies or something--somedays that's how I
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describe myself. You know, I've been
out of law school for 19 years and
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just about half that time I've been in
the business world, not a lawyer, because
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part of what I love about law is that
strategy and business piece and some
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days being mired in the details and the
contracts and the work is like not
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strategic enough, so a lot of us really
like that business aspect and that's
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really, ideally what you're looking for
in a good corporate lawyer--someone
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who's got a business mind, who enjoys
that, who's a quick study in his
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commercial--is another term you'll hear,
which is really understand that this is
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about getting a deal done, having it
makes sense, they can quantify risk and
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things like that. So that's what a
corporate lawyer does. Again, heavy on
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contracts, but you want one who
understands the business world and loves
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that sort of stuff. They're not
interested in disputes and litigation
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and all that sort of stuff. So, if you've
got more questions, drop a comment, send
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me an email. We'd love to hear from you. These videos that I put out are really
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driven by what you want to hear. Again,
that's why I'm doing this one to build
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onto the the one that's been so
successful or had so much attention
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about 'what does is corporate lawyer'. So I
hope you enjoyed it today. Thanks.
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