Adam R. Nelson

‘Getting the law right’ for commercial real estate and business clients

When Adam Nelson started here fresh out of law school in 1995, his office was next to John Thompson, the namesake founder of ThompsonMcMullan.

“I sat down on one of those first days and he told me one thing: ‘Get the law right. We’re too small to get it wrong,’” Adam recalls. “The idea was that we were perfectly capable of going up against larger firms, but only if we got the law right.”

Getting the law right, for Adam, means attention to detail and caring – professionally and, yes, personally, too – for every client matter.

In Adam’s real estate and business transactions practice, he listens carefully to each client to understand the business and the need, rather than merely “jumping into drafting” or “pulling a form off a shelf” to resolve a legal issue. He recognizes that every legal agreement is an aspect of managing a client’s business relationship, from a one-time transaction like selling a business or a property, to a long-term transaction such as leasing a building.

To succeed, Adam pulls from not only more than two decades of legal experience, but also five years’ experience as a corporate financial analyst and his background in psychology. “I often tell people that the most important degree I earned is my psychology degree,” he says. “So much of my work is about understanding people.”

As Adam tells his law school students in advanced transactions classes: the deal drives the drafting, so the lawyer must understand the deal before drafting a document. Your job, he tells his students, is to fix problems for your client and get your client’s deal done, while protecting your client as best you can. “Or, if you cannot protect your client,” he says, “you need to let your client know this truth, so your client can decide whether to walk away from the deal.”

When asked why he had stayed with Adam for more than two decades, a long-standing client of the firm said that Adam is “a businessman with a law degree, who has made me money, and who really cares about me.”

Adam joined the firm after graduating from University of Virginia School of Law; prior to that, he earned his psychology degree and a Master’s in Business Administration (Finance) from the Pennsylvania State University, graduating first in his MBA class. After graduating, he served as a corporate financial analyst for Ford New Holland, Inc., the agricultural subsidiary of Ford Motor Company.