Legal career in real estate leads to practice in mining law

If not for a trip to Costa Rica where he and a friend spent time teaching, Peter Smith, co-founder of the law firm Smith + Malek, might not have become a lawyer. That trip inspired the longtime attorney to go into the legal profession, focusing on real estate as his primary area of expertise.

Smith recently talked with Idaho Business Review Editor Marc Lutz about his journey, the importance of mentoring and legal deserts in desperate need of attorneys.

What follows is the conversation, which has been edited for space.

You spent some time teaching in Costa Rica and it informed your decision to become a lawyer. What was it about that experience that led you to become a lawyer and not a teacher?

Peter Smith: I was going to college in Walla Walla, Washington. I was pre-med the first two years of college, and then a buddy and I decided to go to Costa Rica. Through the college we could go there and teach. I was taking all the science classes, all the pre-med classes. I had a business minor because that seemed to make sense. I went to Costa Rica and I just really enjoyed being there, teaching kids, interacting with people I’d never met, a different culture. It just opened my eyes to the options for different careers.

Then I came back and I was leaning toward business, something involving working with people, maybe being in marketing. Then I took a business law class. What I learned there was essentially a lawyer is somewhat like a teacher. You get people that come to you with a problem they don’t necessarily have a solution to in most cases, or they need advice, or they need counsel on how to fix the problem. Not very much different than teaching when you have people coming to you and they don’t know how to solve a math problem, or they don’t know how to write the essay in a way that’s most convincing. You kind of instruct them.

What I realized what I was learning in the law field was similar to ― but also very challenging ― teaching. Once you get into a teaching career, I learned that you kind of teach the same thing, I hate to say it, over and over again.

Law is different every single day. You still have the same interaction and the ability to help people, the ability to find a solution. When you get to the end of the matter, it’s very rewarding just as it is to teach kids multiplication and it clicks and they get it.

Since starting your career, what areas of law have you practiced?

PS: I started my career in 2004 in Coeur d’Alene, working with a regional firm that had a main office out of Spokane and an office in Coeur d’Alene. I started out working with an attorney who was doing primarily real estate transactions. That was basically my 2004 to 2007. Then the downturn happened. The Great Recession led us right into defaults, a lot of litigation, a lot of real estate deals that were unwinding, bad loans, so taking over projects and representing lenders and trying to get them sold to someone else to take them over.

My career at the beginning was pretty much real estate transactions, then I got into litigation, some bankruptcy court. From there, I’ve always stayed in the business and real estate realm.

About a year ago, I started doing a lot more mining work in our firm. I dabbled in it. I had a number of mining clients over the years, but I wouldn’t say I was focused on it. My last year has been focused in the mining industry.

How is it that mining came about? What’s the focus when it comes to mining law?

PS: It’s really related to real estate. It’s the core principle that underlines both. Mining law in the United States, you have state land and federal land. When you start focusing on it, you’re dealing with in the early phases, how do we get access to property where it could potentially be mined? There are these exploration companies out there that stake their claim, which is putting posts in the ground physically that are 1,500 feet apart by 600 feet apart in a rectangle, and that gives you the right to go mine that if you’re on federal ground and nobody has staked it before you have.

Then, related to that is all the chain of title issues that come into play. You may have different surface owner, somebody else may own the ground where the claim is staked but they don’t own the minerals. You get into issues like that. Then there’s water and air and everything that touches the real estate realm gets wound up into the mining world. Then, on top of that, you’ve got the business entities that are operating the exploration companies, the mining companies. They all have contracts with different vendors and their employees and they’re dealing with public entities, state and federal government, the county and city in some cases. You’ve got all these overlaps that fit nicely within my experience in the real estate realm.

The other motivating factor I had [for getting into mining law] was we have an intern who’s in law school and she’s very interested in going into mining. One of the thoughts was she’s going to come work for us when she graduates and passes the bar, and this was an area I’d been involved with but not truly focused on. When I talked to her and she said, “I really want to do this,” it motivated me a great deal to say, “OK, maybe I can create a practice area where she can step into.” I don’t have to do it forever. I may morph into something else related to real estate, but it will set her on her career.

That goes back to my early career as a lawyer. I had a great group of mentors that helped me learn out of law school the things you just don’t learn in law school. They took time to introduce me clients and show me how to do things. I just wanted to pass that along. When you get somebody that’s really smart and they’re passionate about something, and it kind of motivates you ― after doing it for 19 years, it becomes a bit of a grind ― it’s new and it’s exciting. We got really fortunate because I had some contacts that had some work going on in Washington County, Idaho, so it all just fell into place. Now we have a significant amount of work to keep myself and an intern busy and we have more to come.

What attracts you to mining law?

PS: It motivates me. It’s fun work. I think it’s really important work because relates to the world as a whole, including getting the minerals and metals we need to stop the bad things that can happen to the planet if we don’t change the way we do things. It fits a lot of buckets.

In Smith + Malek, what kind of mentoring programs or partnership track is place?

PS: Interns are primarily law students, usually between their second and third year, so they’ve had some training. They’ll come to work for us during the school year and during the summer. We try to plug them into a practice area they’ve shown some interest in. Our different practice areas are health care, litigation, business and real estate transactions and mining. They get plugged into the teams and the teams have different projects they need help with. If you’re working with the litigation team, you’ll draft motions and briefs, you’ll attend depositions and go to court, see an attorney actually argue a motion. You’ll attend a trial if one is going on. In the business and real estate transactional group, you’ll work on any nature of transactions from drafting contracts to review to you name it: due diligence on real estate deals, reviewing title reports. We try give them as broad exposure as possible in those practice areas so they can pick something for their career that they’re interested in.

And some folks get in and say, “I really don’t like litigation. I’ve tried it. I want to jump over to real estate or mining.” We’re more than happy to have them do that so they can get that experience.

Our goal is to No. 1, see where their interests lie, then give them the exposure so they can make decision for their careers. From our perspective, we’re judging on competency, character and chemistry to see how they fit on our team.

One of the biggest issues in the field right now are law deserts or a lack of lawyers in different places, usually rural communities. Are you seeing that and are there things your firm is doing to try to remedy that?

PS: It is a problem. Moving to a community and starting a practice is a daunting thing to do. Imagine you’re moving to a place like Sandpoint, Idaho. Within the city limits, it has, I think, 8,000 people. It’s where I grew up, so it’s what I’m familiar with. You’re not going to find a firm that’s going to offer you a salary right off the bat because the firms aren’t big enough to support that. So they’re going to put you on whatever you bring in, you get a cut of that revenue.

You may go a month or more. Maybe they’ll give you an upfront. It might not be very much, but they’ll try to help you get your feet underneath you. Then you’re moving into a community where you really don’t know anybody, in some cases, or you haven’t worked there professionally, at least. And that’s a huge barrier for new lawyers coming out of school.

I can go to Boise, I can set up with a firm, I’ve got a salary, they’re going to give me work. It’s just a lot safer place to land as you’re coming out of school with loans and immediate things you need to pay for.

We have offices in Boise, Spokane, Coeur d’Alene and Tri-Cities. But we also have attorneys who work in Colorado, we have attorneys who work in Seattle. We have attorneys who work remotely even within our home areas. If somebody came to us and said, “Hey, I really want to move to Sandpoint, Idaho. It’s where I want to live. I need help getting established.” We have the systems at Smith + Malek to integrate them.

The thing we really focus on though is, we really have to find ways to integrate you into the culture of the firm because the law is kind of an introvert’s dream. You spend a lot of time in your office, writing and thinking and researching. If you do that in a small town and you’re not connected to the firm itself, you can kind of burn out in a way because you feel like you’re all alone.

We work across teams and the teams are not all located in the same locations, so we use all the tools we have at our disposal: Flying people places to get them face to face, video conferencing, using the best technology to get people connected.

But that’s a real challenge in these rural areas. You put somebody there, you want incorporate them into the culture. Though we have all the tools, you have to be very intentional about bringing them into the full experience of what the firm stands for, getting to know people and finding community.