M&A - Bankers vs. Lawyers

Disclaimer: do not work in M&A but work in IB currently and was formerly at one of the very best global law firms. Bankers focus primarily on questions of valuation and strategic angle. Lawyers focus primarily on questions of documentation and risk mitigation. Both are essential components in a transaction, but very different from one another from a practitioner's perspective.

Both are professions that are similarly lucrative. Both will allow you to potentially work on front page transactions. I migrated from law to finance for the following reasons:

1. I disliked pushing punctuation and grammar around on a page all day to produce transaction documents that most people wold never read.

2. I felt that the partnership model of big law lacked meritocracy, and I saw myself as exceptional, and so that was a turn off because I felt it was not the right structure to reward me commensurately. Some law firms (generally the better ones) have gravitated away from the egalitarian model that used to dominate, but the latter is still entrenched at most places.

3. Being a lawyer is even more of a pigeonhole than being a banker, and I felt that the exit option to in-house GC wasn't interesting to me.

4. I think many law firms are in for a reckoning in the coming decades as a lot of legal work is pretty commoditized and there's not a tremendous moat around it. Same can be said of parts of finance, but I felt the situation was more noticeable in law.

5. Both when I was at a law firm and after I left for finance, I felt that many lawyers lack a deep understanding of what it is they're working on. They know the ins-and-outs of indeminities, R&W's, etc. like the back of their hand, but ask them to explain the rationale for a transaction and they flounder. I didn't want to be so far removed from the "action" that I was reduced to a highly sophisticated/compensated document administrator. This has been much better in finance. Finance gets their best junior professionals involved in meaningful client interaction and strategic thought at a very early stage. In law, I rarely if ever saw lawyers interfacing with clients in a meaningful way. Most of the time, if at all, they were just interfacing with their clients' legal department, which is itself removed from the core of the action in a transaction and has been delegated some administrative subset of the work to do.

6. I think a lot of what is taught in law school is grossly masturbatory and bears little on the practice of law in the 21st century. I also loathe the idea that your grades, and therefore professional success, hinges upon the whims of out-of-touch law professors (i.e. people who don't even practice law) and whether you agree with their subjective interpretation of some meaningless obscure point of legal curiosity. Don't feel that the money is worth what you're being taught. If I was going to go to school for three years and blow a fraction of a million, I'd much rather learn something useful or interesting and not what some aged boomer thinks about some legal statute that couldn't matter less for our lives.

I could go on, but will stop here for now. TL; DR:

1. Bankers originate the deal with the help of senior finance, strategy, and c-suite people at the client

2. Bankers drive the process forward, up to and including the point where they instruct their client to hire a law firm and then instruct that law firm to continue running the documentation part of the process/research some facet of the deal/etc.

3. Both are trusted advisors but for different facets of the process and the legal side is very strictly confined to what I consider to be the mundane, impractical, and boring; and

4. Both sides will do mundane work but you will do far more of it as a lawyer. In an abstract and somewhat childish sense, most legal work is "bitch work" as you are essentially just papering a deal that the bankers, the buyers, and the client negotiated the terms of prior to your involvement. You come in to put it in a contract, dot the I's and cross the T's.