The Lazy Lawyer’s Guide to Secured Transactions Under the Code

It is expected that few, if any, who can really qualify as “lazy lawyers” will read this paper. There is, however, an obvious need for a reasonably simple statement which a young Iawyer, for example, may find helpful in explaining article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code to the partners in his firm, or a lender’s lawyer may use in explaining the essentials of article 9 to a borrower’s counsel who has only occasional contact with secured transactions– or, in either case, vice versa.

If we could assume that our learner had absolutely no knowledge of article 9, we could proceed directly to help him correlate that which he knows with that which he must now learn. But we must assume that by this time even our lazy lawyer has been exposed to some of article 9’s new language and concepts-just enough perhaps to puzzle him. If we are to help him understand article 9 with a modest effort, we must see what it is that is likely to make his task seem more difficult than it is.