Surprise: Real Estate Boom Is Padding Lawyers' Accounts

The citywide building boom is translating into a huge windfall for real estate lawyers, as deals for mega-projects, new condominium towers, and warehouses-turned-lofts are filling their filing cabinets. Clients are lining up to hire lawyers to pore over the reams of paper that accompany financing and land use considerations in development, leaving many of the city's real estate attorneys with no shortage of work.

"I can't hire lawyers fast enough because we're so busy," a real estate attorney at the law firm Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman and Herz, Stuart Saft, said.

Work was relatively slow through the 1990s, Mr. Saft said, "and all of a sudden, starting about 1999, and really taking off after 2001, the market went nuts."

In the past five years, the real estate arm of Mr. Saft's firm, of which he is the chairman, has approximately doubled its staff of lawyers, he said, an increase not proportional with the rise in work.

"It's probably quintupled," Mr. Saft said of the added caseload, which today includes more complex financing from deals that can run in the billions.

"When you have to put together $300 million, $500 million, $2 billion, it requires very different kinds of lending and different layers of lending."

Mirroring the citywide demand for real estate lawyers are movements at some local law schools, where interest is growing in the subject, and courses are being added.

The New York Law School recently announced the creation of its Center for Real Estate Studies, and has been expanding its real estate program from four classes a year to 12 in the past five years.

"Everyone's interested in it — everybody wants to be a developer, they want to go work for a law firm, work in-house," said the director of the center, Andrew Berman.

While much of the real estate lawyer boom comes as a result of new building projects, disgruntled neighbors of development, often opposed to the way a project could change the character of their community, play a role as well.

At a meeting of neighborhood groups in Brooklyn's South Park Slope last week, the first item on the agenda was encouraging attendees to drop cash in a big plastic jug for legal fees. The money was intended for neighbors Joseph Levine and Jane Cyphers, who amassed $80,000 in lawyers' fees while successfully fighting off a tall residential tower on their block last year.

After talking with local politicians and attempting to battle the developer without legal representation for months, Mr. Levine said that he eventually realized a lawyer was needed, though he knew the cost would be considerable. "Everybody had done so much to try to stop it that it just seemed like one of those moral crossroads, so we had to fight it no matter what," he said.

"I'm glad we won because we would have had the same legal bill whether we won or lost," said Mr. Levine, whose legal bill was halved by the firm Troutman Sanders after the fight was completed.

The attorney, Caroline Harris, works with both developers and neighborhood groups and has seen a noticeable swell in the number of calls she receives from both, she said.

While about 90% of her clients are developers, there is often an interest from neighborhood residents concerned with projects that may not have the financial means to take on a fight. "There are a lot of people who are bothered by the development around them, but they don't have the wherewithal to explore whether there's a remedy for them," she said.