Customer Reviews

Accounting and Finance for Lawyers in a Nutshell (Nutshell Series)

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After fruitlessly attempting to learn accounting from the truly awful casebook we were using in an "Accounting for Lawyers" class, I bought this book off of Amazon after hearing it made the subject approachable. I've generally been impressed by the quality of West's Nutshell series, and this one is no different. The subjects are arranged in a rational order, the book is edited well, and I understood the material after one read-through. This is a typical nutshell book- no superfluous examples or problem sets that no professor actually assigns, just straightforward doctrine. If you're taking an Accounting for Lawyers class or are a solo practicioner looking to delve into some financial statements without hiring an accountant, this should get you by just fine.

Law schools purport to teach you to "think like a lawyer." While this is important for navigating the world of courts and contracts, it can be a huge obstacle to communicating with non-lawyers (especially non-lawyer professionals). As a lawyer who works frequently with statisticians, chemists, and accountants, it has been my my experience that the communication divide between attorneys and accountants is the most difficult. Accountants use flexible, conventional terms and processes to reach precise quantitative results. Lawyers use precise, qualitative language to control fuzzy indeterminate results. Worst of all, we share many jargon words (liability, equity, asset) but use them differently.

This book is written for a lawyer who "thinks like a lawyer" and wants a book to just "lay it out." It assumes no prior knowledge and all the jargon terms are defined at the outset. Areas of ambiguity or subjectivity are clearly flagged. The author then walks us through accountancy, step by meticulous step, without any advanced math. Like all good legal writing, it is dense with information, but perfectly clear and as brief as possible.

This book will teach you the language of the accountant and how to read financial statements. If you are looking to learn to DO accounting, you need a different book. But if you want to work effectively with accountants, to see relevance in financial statements, and to prepare expert witnesses, this book is peerless. If only there were a similar book for accountants, so they could understand me!

This is going on my list for pre-law reading.

I don't think the Nutshells are as helpful as the E&Es. (I usually only purchase the Nutshell when there isn't an E&E available.) But the summaries were easy to understand and the coverage was comprehensive. I still found it useful.

The book came very quickly and was in very good shape. Unfortunately, I was looking for information on how a lawyer should set up accounting software. This book was more for a lawyer trying to understand accounting principles, terms etc for litigation purposes. But this could come in handy at a later time.