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Happily Ever After: Fostering The Role Of The Transactional Lawyer As Storyteller, Karen J. Sneddon

Articles

Transactional documents do more than allocate the risk of loss or select the governing law. Transactional documents, whether employment contracts or lease agreements, encapsulate the wishes, hopes, and fears of the transacting parties. The documents share a series of events, identify the key actors in those events, and anticipate particular outcomes or future events. In other words, the transactional documents are narratives. The transactional lawyer is thus more than a transactional intermediary. The transactional lawyer is the narrative agent or storyteller.

The “narrative” is often associated with the following words: story, tale, fiction, and entertainment. These associations may appear to …