Corporate M&A
Drafting share purchase agreements, redlining definitions sections, closing deals at midnight.
A day, honestly described.
You will spend your first six months redlining definitions sections and condition-precedent schedules in share purchase agreements that the partner has already negotiated. The intellectual content of your day is procedural: have all the conditions been met for closing? Has the transferor obtained its no-objection certificate? Does the warranty schedule reflect what diligence found? You will read the same SPA forty times. The first read is bewildering. The fifteenth, you start noticing what the partner left out.
A typical day runs from 10 AM to a deeply uncertain end-time — anywhere from 9 PM on a slow week to 3 AM in the week before signing. You will be on calls with bidders, with sellers, with bankers, with disclosure schedule consultants. You will draft the indemnity provisions twice and watch the partner rewrite them once. You will not see a courtroom unless something has gone catastrophically wrong, and even then, the dispute will go to arbitration.
The work that matters happens in the definitions section and the warranties. Most of what looks like deal-making is risk allocation expressed in adverbs and qualifiers — "material", "reasonable", "to the knowledge of". Junior associates who pick up that risk-allocation reflex move up. The ones who treat the SPA as paperwork stay behind.
Where the work happens. Who hires. What you'll be paid.
Where the work happens
Recruitment pathway
Tier-1 M&A teams recruit primarily through pre-placement offers from internships at the same firm. The structured path is: 3rd-year internship → 4th-year internship → PPO. Off-cycle internships matter less than people believe; what gets you the PPO is repeatedly being the intern the team wants on the next deal.
NLU vs non-NLU matters most at the entry door — Day-1 hiring on most NLU campuses skews to firms in this list. Non-NLU candidates compete through internship performance and lateral moves at the 1–2 year mark. A 65%+ undergraduate score and an internship history that includes at least one Tier-1 firm is the working baseline.
First-year vs senior associate
Definitions, schedules, conditions precedent, closing checklists. You will draft the disclosure letter from diligence findings under partner supervision. You will rarely speak in negotiations. You will read other lawyers' drafts more than you write your own. The skill being built is document fluency.
Lead drafting on the SPA from term sheet onward, with partner review on critical clauses. Manage the diligence team and the data room. Negotiate directly with the other side's associates and senior associates. Run the closing. You are still not in court, but the partner now trusts you with substantive judgment calls — what to flag as a red-flag warranty, what to walk away from.
Compensation bands (approximate)
What law students consistently lack — and how to fix it.
Each gap below is something we have heard from Corporate M&A hiring partners. The simulation column is what closes it before your first internship.
Most law students have never seen a real share purchase agreement — only their textbook abstractions of conditions precedent and indemnity clauses.
The Iura M&A simulation puts a real-shape SPA in your browser and asks you to flag specific risk-allocation issues. You produce a markup that recruiters can read.
Students conflate "deal lawyer" with "deal-maker". The work is risk-mapping in document form, not negotiation theatre.
The simulation's structured tasks force you into the redlining-and-clause-mapping mode of work that the actual job demands.
No exposure to disclosure letters — yet they are the load-bearing document in most M&A diligence flows.
The simulation asks you to draft a disclosure letter from a fact pattern. The model answer shows you what a partner-level disclosure looks like.
Inability to triage a 60-page agreement under time pressure — the daily work of every junior associate.
Timed review tasks teach you to pull the load-bearing clauses (indemnity, governing law, termination) from the rest.
Work your first corporate m&a brief — free, in your browser, in 45 minutes.
A real-shape brief, scored against a model answer. The fastest way to find out whether Corporate M&A feels like work you want to do for the next decade.
Start the simulation →Get the full Corporate M&A career guide.
Six pages: firm rankings, internship timeline, the skills checklist, salary bands. Sent as a PDF.
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If this is the work you want to do, the cheapest fastest test is to do an M&A simulation and see whether the redlining mindset feels generative or tedious. If you finish the brief and want another one, the path is right. If you finish it and feel relieved, the diagnostic was wrong and the result page is generous — go back and look at your secondary matches.