About
Solon Press publishes interactive workbooks for lawyers who work on transactions — or want to. Each workbook is a complete fictional deal with its full documents attached: you read the agreement clause by clause, watch the deal move, and test yourself as you go. It runs in the browser, works just as well on a phone, and there is not a single video of someone talking at you.
Law school teaches you the law: doctrine, cases, the deep structure. It is genuinely important, and it is genuinely not what happens on the first day of practice. Nobody hands a junior a deal and explains it. The partner has no time, the senior associate has a closing, and the work that lands on your desk — proofreading, bundling, conditions-precedent checklists — teaches you the machinery of a transaction one fragment at a time, under deadline, from the least patient teacher there is.
That method works. It is just slow and expensive: two years as a trainee, more as a junior trusted with ancillary documents, all before anyone lets you near a client with an opinion of your own. The profession calls this “learning by doing”. A lot of it is learning by suffering.
A workbook is the missing manual for that period. The whole deal on the table, every document in full, every clause explained by someone who has negotiated one like it — the file read the way senior lawyers read it, without waiting years for somebody to show you. What you do with the head start is up to you; early responsibility tends to find the people who are ready for it.
Junior lawyers and trainees read it to close the gap above — to walk into the room already knowing how the machine fits together, and why every document in the pile exists.
Senior associates, partners and heads of legal read it the other way round: as a structured account of things they know but have rarely had to articulate. If you have ever paused halfway through explaining to a junior who really pays for the option pool, or why the disclosure letter matters more than the warranties — this is that explanation, written down, with the documents attached. The workbooks will not make anyone a better teacher; they do make the explaining faster.
In-house counsel read it to see the whole of a deal they usually meet in slices — and to keep outside counsel honest about which parts are genuinely difficult.
Law students are welcome too, with one warning: this is the part of the job they do not examine you on. Yet.
The workbooks are built on common law concepts, with English law as the reference point. If you practise in England and Wales, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Cyprus or Malta, this is home ground: the architecture of the deals here is the architecture of yours.
If you practise in a civil-law jurisdiction, you will still recognise almost everything. Cross-border transactions the world over are built to the common law pattern — the same warranties, the same completion mechanics, the same waterfall — and parties with no connection to England routinely choose English law to govern their deals anyway. English law is, after the English language, the most successful export the English crown has ever produced. The workbooks teach the pattern; your own jurisdiction supplies the local variations.
Solon Press is written and reviewed by a small team of practising lawyers with both private-practice and in-house experience — at the senior end of it, more than twenty years in practice. Content is drafted by practitioners and then reviewed by colleagues who specialise in the relevant field, which is why a workbook occasionally argues with itself in the margins.
Between them, the authors and reviewing editors have practised at or with firms and institutions including White & Case, Herbert Smith Freehills, DLA Piper, PwC, KPMG and HSBC, and at private equity firms and venture capital funds. None of those organisations is affiliated with Solon Press or endorses it; they are simply where the experience comes from.
That experience is cross-border by trade — matters governed by, or involving, the laws of:
— and across practice areas: corporate and M&A, banking and finance, capital markets, energy and infrastructure, project finance, trade finance, regulatory and compliance, litigation, arbitration, and restructuring and insolvency.
Every workbook is built around an invented transaction — several of them share one company, whose €3,000 incorporation in 2020 becomes a €42 million exit you can read from both sides of the table. Fiction is not a limitation; it is the point. A real deal file is confidential, half-missing and full of noise. A fictional one can be complete, internally consistent, and wrong in exactly the instructive places — every skeleton in the data room was put there deliberately, because finding it teaches you something.
The library grows. Beyond the deal-craft titles in development, we are planning country-specific workbooks — the practical machinery of particular jurisdictions, written with the same method: complete documents, worked examples, no waffle. If there is a title you wish existed, tell us: chief@solonpress.com. The best pages in a library like this get written because a reader asked an awkward question.
Solon of Athens repealed a legal code so harsh that its author's name became the word “draconian”, rewrote it in a form ordinary citizens could live under, and then — by the accounts we choose to believe — left town for ten years so nobody could make him amend it. Lawgiver, plain-language reformer, and firmly against scope creep. We aspire to all three. (The stress falls on the first syllable: SO-lon.)
The small print, honestly stated
Solon Press is published by Simple Digital Partners Ltd, Cyprus. It is not a law school, not an accredited education provider, and nothing on it is legal advice — the Terms say this at proper length. The deals are fictional, the lessons are not.