Preface and Acknowledgments

• Author: Gregory M Stein - Michael D Goodwin - Morton P Fisher Jr
• Pages: 14-15

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Preface and Acknowledgments

Our aim in this third edition continues to be to introduce the lawyer

who is unfamiliar with transactional real estate law to this area of

practice. Whether you are a newly admitted lawyer, a lawyer who

specializes in another type of law but handles the occasional real

estate matter, or a lawyer who is beginning to refocus on real estate

law, we hope this book will help you break into this fascinating

practice area. The real estate market has changed dramatically since

the publication of the second edition, and this revision attempts to

reflect those changes. It includes updates and revisions to the text

and appendices and several new documents. Throughout the revi-

sion process, we were attentive to comments we received from read-

ers of the previous editions, and we thank you for your advice.

We have written this book at an intermediate to advanced level.

Our assumption continues to be that most people who use it will

be working on challenging transactions that require a high degree

of skill and therefore will want a detailed and careful treatment of

commercial real estate law. Nonetheless, the lawyer who is looking

for a less comprehensive approach also can benefit from this book

by using selected sections to obtain more of an overview.

No matter how recently you graduated from law school, we

have assumed that you have a reasonably strong understanding of

real property and real estate finance law but less of an idea of how to

undertake the day-to-day tasks that commercial real estate lawyers

must perform in a practice setting. We hope this book will aid you in

closing the gap between your basic law school knowledge and your

current law practice by helping you take that basic legal knowledge

and use it productively on behalf of your clients.

For this reason, we have tried throughout to combine the prac-

tical and the academic. Toward that end, the book offers detailed

textual explanations of different aspects of commercial real estate

practice followed, as appropriate, by forms, checklists, comments,

cautions, and suggested techniques. This approach reflects our own

backgrounds: one of us is a law professor who previously practiced

at a large firm in New York, and the other two of us are lawyers

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