Helping You Navigate, Negotiate and Document Complex Real Estate & BusinessTransactions

Joel D. Ruben is a Manhattan Beach commercial and residential real estate attorney and business attorney with 49 years of experience representing buyers, sellers, developers, investors, homeowners, landlords, tenants and business owners in complex Southern California real estate and business transactions. Mr. Ruben has an AV rating from Martindale-Hubbell -- the highest rating it confers for legal ability and professional ethics.  After 42 years of learning how poorly drafted contracts and end up in court, Mr. Ruben now focuses on helping clients prevent future problems, negotiate and document transactions, and devise and implement solutions to their legal problems before a lawsuit is filed.

Seeing the Big Picture With a Focus On Minimizing Risks and Solving Problems

Protecting your real property and business Interests

When you are buying or selling real estate or a business, or leasing commercial real property, you are faced with a variety of challenges.  How should the deal be documented?  What is involved in due diligence? If you discover problems during the due diligence, should you re-negotiate or or walk away?   After the due diligence is completed, what are the steps for successfully closing the transaction?  You want a lawyer who will answer those questions for you, protect your interests and minimize the risk of a future lawsuit.  Joel Ruben can help you achieve those goals.

Solving Legal Problems     

Sometimes it is too late to employ “an ounce of prevention,” and you don’t know if a “pound of cure” will be enough to remedy your problem.  Dealing with a legal problem is not like patching a flat tire.  While both will slow you down, there could be a creative solution to your legal problem that is not readily apparent.  It takes a seasoned lawyer like Joel to devise a creative and cost-effective strategy to resolving your problem when another lawyer might see only the path to the courthouse.  

Litigation, in the rear view mirror

After litigating problematic contracts for 42 years with considerable success, I decided to focus on preventing problems. In 2019, I decided to limit my practice to real estate and business transactions and pre-litigation dispute resolution. I have not looked back. Often times, litigation is wasteful, expensive and unproductive. But I recognize that sometimes litigation is unavoidable.  An adversary may compel you to file lawsuit to redress a wrong.  Or you may already have been sued. I can use his extensive litigation experience to interface with your litigation counsel to ensure that your case is handled in a strategic, cost-effective manner, consistent with your objectives.