Legal News

Eight is Enough: Introducing the (Very) Busy Deal Lawyers at Treasury

By Ashby Jones

A question for all those young M&A lawyers looking at yet another month of sluggish billables: Have you considered government work?

According to this story in Legal Times, the Treasury Department’s where it’s at for M&A action. Actually, it sounds like the department’s got more action than it can handle.

Since October, lawyers at the Treasury Department’s Office of General Counsel have completed $306 billion worth of deal work stemming from the Troubled Assets Relief Program. Since then, they’ve closed 418 separate transactions with financial institutions receiving funding under TARP’s capital purchase program.

According to the story, the work marks a transformation for the office, which traditionally focuses on supplying policy advice and interpreting law for Treasury’s other divisions. Now, its lawyers say their responsibilities more closely resemble those of a corporate transactional law shop.

“We work easily 12-hour days and pretty much every weekend,” says Laurie Schaffer, the department’s assistant general counsel for banking and finance.

Of course, they’re not doing it all on their own: Treasury has contracted with a number of private law firms to assist with the work, but the deal flow is being tightly managed from within the general counsel’s office. And while Treasury’s in-house legal division employs 2,000 lawyers, including those working for the IRS, the bulk of the work has been funneled to the eight-lawyer banking and finance section.

Now that the remaining $350 billion in TARP funds have been released, and President Barack Obama’s administration has said it plans to infuse even more cash into banking and lending institutions, the lawyers are bracing for another wave of work.

“The whole building is just sort of moving at all times,” says Treasury’s counselor to the general counsel, Stephen Albrecht. “Everyone realizes this is a very important time.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 24, 2009 (boomark / email).