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It has changed profoundly. What – I’ve been doing this over 20 years, and for – we’ve had two recessions; the big one was the Great Recession. And prior to that, there was never a focus on sort of the totally, utterly, and in every way inconceivable events. Owners didn’t go broke – or sometimes they did, but it was rare. Banks never went broke; that never happened.
Now, especially in the last half-dozen years, when you’re negotiating a contract, you really look at “What if the deal goes bad? What if the owner goes broke? What if the lender goes broke?” Whether it’s negotiating a lease or negotiating a construction contract, we’re now looking at the dark cloud like we never did before. And that’s adding a great deal more complexity to the contracts, which is a big evolution.
I don’t know if eventually, we’ll – the pendulum has swung one way. Will it swing the other way in a few years, and we’ll be back to sort of normal? But for the foreseeable future, and I think for most of the balance of my practice, that’s going to be – we’re going to be much more rigorous than we were before. That’s caused increased complexity; that’s caused lawyers to be involved more; it’s caused a really fundamental change in real estate construction, which was sort of a handshake deal, in many cases, for the first 20 years.
Minneapolis business attorney Stephen Yoch of Felhaber Larson discusses the changing landscape of the construction industry.