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Erin K. Tenner grew up in Michigan, the car capital of the world, and has been representing buyers and sellers of auto dealerships since 1986.

So you might be curious what kind of car she drives.

“I have driven an Acura since 1990,” she says. “I was literally driven over by a semitruck in my first Acura, an Acura Legend, and my husband and I both walked away relatively unscathed.  … A lot of dealers have tried to get me in other cars, but there is something about me and Acuras. … I love that car.”

Tenner, who handles both single- and multistore transactions (her personal record is 13 franchises in one transaction), is a pioneer in the field—a nationally recognized speaker who has published the California Auto Dealer newsletter since 1996.

“It used to be there were only five attorneys in California who handled buy/sells for auto dealers and purchase agreements were a max 25 pages. Now agreements can reach almost 80 pages and [over the last 20 years] even large law firms have gotten into handling buy/sells,” she says. It helps, she adds, that purchase prices have risen from under $10 million to more than $200 million for a single store—though most remain between $10 and $40 million.

It’s so much fun working with auto dealers. They are a very gregarious bunch for the most part, great characters, and they aren’t easily intimidated.

She got into the auto arena by chance. After moving west—“I always wanted to be in California or Colorado,” Tenner says—she landed her first job with a firm in Century City that worked strictly with auto dealers. She was thrown into the deep end quickly—and willingly. “I was hired by an attorney who was also a CPA, a great mentor and person. In my first week he had me talk to a client about a purchase agreement,” she says. “I got direct client contact right away.”

It helped that she liked the clients. “It’s so much fun working with auto dealers,” she says. “They are a very gregarious bunch for the most part, great characters, and they aren’t easily intimidated.”

Neither is Tenner. “I can be intimidating,” she says, “and something about my approach worked. Sometimes I have to be intimidating to get them to listen and to do what I tell them to do.”

To their benefit. Once, a client wanted to assign his lease to a buyer. “I suggested to him that he should ask the factory, from whom he was leasing the property, for a novation”—an agreement that the seller would no longer be liable on the lease once it was assigned to someone else. “He had personally guaranteed the lease and had not asked for it by the time we were ready to close the transaction. So I called the factory and asked for it—over the protests of the broker who thought I was going to blow the deal. For some reason brokers and dealers think these transactions are very fragile and easily blow up. That has not been my experience, so despite his protests, and because my client agreed that it might be a good idea to be off the hook for the lease after closing, I made the call. I had the novation in hand within an hour and we closed escrow that day.”

Good thing, too. When the economy collapsed in 2008 and the auto industry was devastated, the buyer filed for bankruptcy. “The seller was fairly young and had just begun to build some wealth from his business,” Tenner says. “He told me that if had he not gotten the novation, he would have been facing financial ruin.”

So it goes in the car business. “Dealers can make a ton of money and lose a ton of money in a flash,” she says. But as a rule, she adds, they’re creative, never give up, and enjoy their successes. “I went to the wedding of a client’s daughter, my client for 35 years, and he lived on a big horse ranch and vineyard. The daughter, in her wedding dress, came riding in on a horse. They have fun.”

So does Tenner. “I’ve been able to maintain a nice work-life balance over a 35-year career,” she says. “I’m proud of that.”