Real Estate Lawyer and Partner, Ice Miller LLP

My name is Jeff, and I'm a real estate lawyer. Yeah, so I've got all different types of clients. I have developer clients who, their general business is building new properties. I represent universities. I represent businesses who just own one piece of real estate, or lease their real estate. And then we represent funds and other investor type entities that buy real estate as an investment vehicle. So typically, I'd be involved starting at the letter of intent stage, when they're first negotiating with the seller of a property. We would negotiate the letter of intent which is the basic terms, the purchase price, what we're buying. The real basics. And then I usually work with the clients to negotiate a purchase agreement. We would handle, typically all the due diligence for them. So we would look at title and survey, any leases of the property, anything unique with respect to the property, environmental issues, and then really help make sure they're getting what they're expecting to get. Yeah, my day is scattered all across. So it's six to ten deals all at the same time, so it's one of the skills is just time management. Making sure you're responding to people, and thankfully we've got a good team, so I can pass things on to others, but it's really on me to make sure deals are moving forward. One of the more recent deals I worked on that was interesting was the, there's a hotel Embassy Suites, right across from Notre Dame and it was a new construction deal, so we had one of the investors fall out towards the end of the closing of the deal. And it was a lot of dealing with local municipality, dealing with our lender, and really just making sure all the joint venture documents worked to bring it to closing. So it's never a straight process. It always, move a little forward and then something else happens and you move backwards.