Home sales have been at near record levels. Lawyers who do residential real estate work can expect their own volume of cases to be high as new buyers enter the market and current owners sell and trade up. The downside is that the residential real estate field is steadily becoming more complex and more competitive.
Closings can be highly complex, detailed affairs.
Lawyers must deal with new disclosure laws, environmental regulations, increasingly complicated tax considerations, and deepening layers of lender documents and demands. All of those things raise more potential exposure for lawyers to liability claims. While closings are becoming more time-consuming and risky, attorneys are not going to be compensated for that greater time and exposure due to the highly competitive market and other agencies attempting to eliminate lawyers from the process. The trend away from lawyer representation for buyers and sellers is of great concern. The average buyer is not going to understand title commitments or loan documents and lenders representatives and title officers cannot always be counted on to point out the issues a buyer or seller needs to be concerned about.