Pircher, Nichols & Meeks Successfully Completes Second Annual Joint Venture Challenge

LOS ANGELES - May 16, 2014 - PRLog -- Pircher, Nichols & Meeks (http://www.pircher.com/), a national real estate law firm with offices in Los Angeles and Chicago (http://www.pircher.com/contact.html), has successfully completed its second annual Joint Venture Challenge, a program designed by the firm to effectively bridge the gap between law school education and hands-on training in the legal sector.

The firm, which represents a number of major capital sources in real estate transactions, including joint ventures between capital sources and real estate developers, conducted the challenge for students at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and University of California, Berkeley.

“Joint venture arrangements can be perfect teaching tools, both for business and law students,” said Phil Nichols, of counsel in the Los Angeles office of Pircher, Nichols & Meeks. “Top law schools have struggled to find effective ways to incorporate sophisticated practical training in transactional law, so the program has been devised to make this important connection, and provide students with unique training before entering the professional world.”

At UCLA, the Milken Institute provided a $3,000 prize to the first place team, which was presented by Kevork Zoryan of Morgan Stanley and Stevens Carey of Pircher, Nichols & Meeks to Daniel Nagel, Nick Salameh and Steve Serna.

According to Nichols, the firm drafted deal memos about two hypothetical transactions, while the students, who were in teams consisting of at least one law student and one MBA candidate, answered questions about these opportunities.

The memos describe opportunities to buy joint venture interests from “Leverage Brothers,” a fictional company that made aggressive real estate deals. One involved a very successful hotel, while the other was about a venture that owned thousands of undeveloped residential lots in Phoenix. Each deal memo had various provisions from the joint venture agreements for these fictional transactions.

A similar prize was awarded to the winning team at UC Berkeley, funded by Leo Pircher, who graduated from the Boalt Law School more than 50 years ago. The prize was presented by Josh Myerberg of Morgan Stanley, Carey and Nichols on to Arek Malinowski, Ben Bradbury, Mary Loum and Kim McGinnis.

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About Pircher, Nichols & Meeks

Founded in 1983, Pircher, Nichols & Meeks is a national real estate law firm with a diversified real estate practice, which also includes litigation, bankruptcy, tax and corporate matters.  The firm maintains offices in Los Angeles and Chicago. For additional informati on, please visit www.pircher.com.