Commercial property (or real estate) lawyers act for a variety of domestic and international clients - including property investors and developers, governments, landowners and public sector bodies - on a wide range of transactions, involving anything from offices and houses to retail developments and industrial units.

In general, the legal issues on which firms offer expertise include acquisitions and disposals of commercial properties, investments, landlord and tenant matters, lettings sales, developments and contracts, insolvency planning applications and environmental law and liabilities. A great deal of the work involves new ways to execute transactions, whether through financing, developing or co-investing.

Libbie Henderson is a partner in the commercial development team at leading regional firm Dickinson Dees. An early ambition to be a barrister was dented by what she describes as the sheer amount of legal theory she and her fellow students were expected to absorb at university. She left college unsure about her future, but during a year working in the charity sector she decided to give law another chance and took her LPC. It was then that she discovered that the legal profession had a lot more to offer than she had previously thought.

"It was when I was doing the LPC that I realised the practical application of the law was what I wanted to pursue," she recalls. "It's entirely different from the theory. The dryness of the subject, particularly in the property area, can be quite daunting at university. Students seem to have an impression of what being a lawyer is like which is not necessarily true to life, which I think comes from television and film portrayal of the profession. The only way students can understand the true nature and variety of work involved in the job is by doing some work experience: getting into a law firm and seeing what we actually do on a daily basis. My work experience and the LPC gave me a much clearer idea about what being a lawyer was like. A lot of what we do is commercial negotiation, and while we do apply the law every day, we don't always realise we are doing it - it becomes second nature. Our role is often more like being a business and commercial adviser than being a legal adviser, drawing on our experience to assist clients in making decisions."

In that sense, Libbie views her transactional work as diametrically opposed to the job of a litigator. "You spend more of your time negotiating the form of documentation" she points out. "Yes, you are arguing points of law to a certain extent; but a lot of the development work I do is structuring - it's making documentation fit round what your client wants to achieve in commercial terms."

One of the great plus points for Libbie about property law is the diversity of the caseload. "There's such a variety of work," she enthuses. "As a firm and department, we act for a wide variety of property clients including developers, house builders, funders and public sector bodies. We also act for a number of household-name clients and blue-chip clients. Within our team, our main focus is commercial development work: covering areas such as residential and commercial development, funding and general property management. We act for clients with large property portfolios and assist them in managing, developing and eventually disposing of their sites. We deal with the structuring aspects of large development sites - some good examples are the work which we do for local authorities and developers in relation to town centre redevelopments, our house builder work, and waste and energy generation sites such as landfills and wind farms. We also deal with the relocation of clients to new premises, assisting them through the planning and build process and the redevelopment of their vacated sites."

With such a broad spectrum to cover, development lawyers must often enlist the help of other experts and Libbie suggests that this also requires a certain flair. "Because we run projects, on occasion we need to pull in a variety of specialist lawyers from across other areas of the firm to assist with decision making and to look at complex property documentation from a different perspective," she says. "As an indication of the sorts of issue that can arise when you are dealing with a development site, we work with our planning lawyers, construction lawyers, banking lawyers and environmental lawyers. I think one of the skills that you have to develop as a development lawyer is how to spot when there is a problem or a complex area and when you need to enlist the assistance of a specialist."

As an example of the sheer range of work the sector involves, Libbie gives a rundown of everything that's on her plate right now: "At the moment I have got several large developments on the go. I've got one large residential acquisition for a household-name house builder; I'm assisting a developer client with a back-to-back deal that it is struggling to get to work; I've got another client which is looking at acquiring a number of sites across the country to construct energy generation plants. In addition, I'm acting for a client which is looking to structure the disposal of one of its redundant factory sites for a mixed-use development, which means we are having to work very closely with our chartered town planner colleagues. Every now and then among all of this, somebody will bowl you a googly: one of your regular clients can ring up at any time and urgently need you to check the deeds for a certain site, so you have to have everything to hand and work within their timescales."

For Libbie, this potentially hectic workload means that certain character traits will serve you well as a commercial property lawyer. "When you are a junior property lawyer, one of the skills you need is the ability to spin plates, as I call it" she says. "You have to be able to do more than one thing at a time, because inevitably you will have several files that you are progressing at once. You also need a good memory - it's essential. Organisation is critical. You need to able to lay your hands on information quickly for clients. You need to have an analytical brain and you also need to be able to apply common sense. In that respect, it's good to have an understanding of the marketplace in which you will be working. If students want to give themselves a head start, they should read publications like the Estates Gazette to get an overview of the market and understand what a ‘yield' is and why it's important; to understand rents and why the retail market is different from the industrial market. If you become any type of commercial property lawyer, when you are confronted with a problem you need to be able to look at it from both a legal perspective and a practical perspective. It's about giving the client good, sensible, commercial advice."