Probably not.

Still, it’s possible to lose track of just how many deals Fried Frank partner Meyer Last inked in 2011. Call it the Jon Mechanic effect.

Meyer Last. (Photo by Kiki Conway)

Mr. Mechanic, the head of Fried Frank’s real estate practice, is a staple of industry social and speaking events as well as host of the firm’s annual holiday party, one of real estate’s biggest gatherings of the year.

On top of it, Mr. Mechanic is often the attorney on the city’s largest leasing and sales deals. As a result, he has become the city’s most recognized real estate lawyer and, in a business where brokers and landlords usually get the credit for arranging transactions anyway, tends to overshadow the rest of his ilk.

“Jon is this incredible combination between being a brilliant marketer for the firm and also an exceptional lawyer. Very few really can combine both the way he does,” Mr. Last said. There isn’t an ounce of rivalry in the way Mr. Last speaks of his colleague; he’s genuinely in awe.

After a year like 2011, however, Mr. Last may give Mr. Mechanic a run for his money. While Mr. Mechanic was one of the lead attorneys on the year’s biggest and most prestigious leasing transaction, Condé Nast’s one-million-plus-square-foot deal at 1 World Trade Center, Mr. Last has tallied his own dizzying array of high-stakes deals.

He represented the landlord George Comfort & Sons in its 900,000-square-foot lease with the Japanese financial company Nomura at Worldwide Plaza. He also was the attorney for Brookfield Properties, one of Fried Frank’s biggest clients, in its 750,000-plus-square-foot renewal at the World Financial Center with Bank of America.

The two deals caused something of an awkward situation for Mr. Last.

Nomura was one of the World Financial Center’s largest tenants and for a time Brookfield was competing fiercely with George Comfort & Sons to hold onto the company. So while Mr. Last was negotiating to keep Bank of America on the one hand, he was simultaneously arranging to have Nomura go elsewhere.

Such is the balancing act of being one of the city’s most successful real estate attorneys.

“Needless to say, I never mentioned the word Nomura during the Bank of America talks,” Mr. Last said. “Brookfield is an incredibly sophisticated owner and they’re able to recognize that I’m not the one deciding where Nomura is going. I’m working for my client. In theory sometimes every attorney has to watch out for conflicts of interest. Usually my connections facilitate deals though.”

Mr. Last said he wasn’t even sure the Nomura deal was going to go through until only days before the lease was signed during the summer—a revelation that shows just how uncertain the world of big-time dealmaking can actually be. Though it takes many months to arrive at a deal, last-minute decisions, even whims, can unwind or seal even the most carefully planned transactions.

George Comfort & Sons, Mr. Last said, was also in serious negotiations with another tenant, which, though smaller than Nomura, was in talks to do a deal for higher rents.

“The final week, the week before the Nomura lease was done, I would have guessed the other deal,” Mr. Last said. “We had a meeting with Nomura on a Sunday. All day we met and were able to close a lot of the points and get it near completion and Peter Duncan [George Comfort’s chief executive] decided to go with it.”
Mr. Last sat with The Commercial Observer at the company’s Midtown conference center high in the Seagrams Building, one of Midtown’s most exclusive towers. The space is small, purposely so, to assure that the location is strictly a place for meetings and doesn’t evolve into something more akin to a small Midtown branch where attorneys begin to regularly hang their hats. Fried Frank’s main offices are downtown, in 1 New York Plaza, an office building owned by Brookfield Properties.

“We felt like it was important to be downtown, that if we moved to Midtown, we probably wouldn’t come to lower Manhattan as much,” Mr. Last said.

There’s no denying the building’s elegance. Even the original amber-tone lights, hardly within the spectrum of a typical office environment but that by landmark regulations must be left untouched near the building’s windows so that they continue to produce the building’s signature bronze glow, have a charm.
“I’ve grown to love the building,” Mr. Last said. “It’s a calm environment, the lobby, the way the building is in the middle of everything but at once also removed because of the plaza area.”

Mr. Last came to Fried Frank in the 1980s. By the 1990s he was made a partner. Large leases are nothing new to him. Last year probably wasn’t even his biggest year. Years ago he arranged a million-plus-square-foot deal to have Standard & Poor’s take space at 55 Water Street, which, at a staggering 3.8 million square feet, is the city’s largest office property. He also worked on the deal to have Citibank sell 1 Court Square, the large office building it owned in Long Island City, and lease back about 1.4 million square feet of space there.

Still, if 2011 wasn’t the biggest, it missed out only by a hair and it easily could have been even bigger. Mr. Last represented the Swiss bank UBS in its talks to take 900,000 or more square feet at the World Trade Center. The deal would have anchored a whole new tower at the site, 3 World Trade Center, and would have allowed the bank to relocate staff there from Stamford, Conn. The lease was in talks for months, but when the European debt crisis boiled over, the bank eventually canceled the plan.

Mr. Last said it wasn’t hard juggling all the deals during the year.

“When you’re in the middle of it, it’s adrenaline, the deals are exciting and when you’re in the thick of negotiating them, there’s definitely that adrenaline factor,” Mr. Last said. “I can get going a lot quicker on three hours sleep during an exciting period than on a full night if there’s not much going on.”

His pipeline doesn’t show signs of flagging. Already, in the opening days of  2012, he helped arrange a deal in China outside of Shanghai, representing the New York-based development company Tishman Speyer in a 600,000-square-foot lease to have the apparel giant Nike anchor a new office complex Tishman is going to be build in the area.

“To me there is nothing more fun than working on development deals,” Mr. Last said. “You’re transforming an empty hole in the ground into a new structure or piece of infrastructure. They’re always the most interesting deals.”

dgeiger@observer.com

5:45 The 116th annual REBNY banquet is just getting started at the New York Hilton. Chicago Title is having an invitation-only party on the building’s second floor.

5:46 As usual, the night’s official festivities begin with a cocktail party in the room adjacent to the Hilton’s main ballroom, where the dinner is held. Jason Muss, a principal at Muss Development, stands near the entrance to the room with Jared Kushner (owner of The Commercial Observer), Jared’s wife, Ivanka, and Fried Frank chief Jon Mechanic. “I love this party. It’s a great place to catch up with people,” Mr. Muss says.

5:50 The cocktail reception is quickly filling up. Simon Ziff, a principal at the financing company Ackman Ziff, stands near the open bar with his wife. “It’s overwhelming,” Mr. Ziff says. “Think of all the people here. A few seconds to say hi to each. That’s a lot of seconds.”

6:00  Hal Fetner, a developer who is building two prominent residential buildings with partner the Durst Organization, steps over to the bar. “The feeling in the room is always tied to the health of the market,” he says. So what’s the vibe? “Ask me later. It’s too early to tell. But I think things are good.”

6:01 John Santora, an executive at the real estate services firm who recently helped negotiate an agreement between landlords and the union that represents building employees, 32BJ, is chatting with C&W appraisal expert Brian Corcoran. “A lot of people worked on that deal,” Mr. Santora says of the negotiations. “I can’t take the credit for it.”

Steve Spinola, REBNY’s president, greets guests in the main room of the cocktail space. “We had to put a few tables upstairs,” Mr. Spinola says, indicating that attendance at the banquet has picked up from last year. “We got a lot of last-minute calls from people who wanted to come.”

6:17  Alan Weiner, the group head of Wells Fargo Multifamily Capital, one of the biggest lenders in the city, is chatting busily with Rob Speyer, one of the chief executives of the real estate firm Tishman Speyer.

Eric Deutsch, the former head of the Downtown Alliance who now is an executive at Montparnasse 56, a builder of observation decks, surveys the crowd. “My first job out of college in the early 1990s was with REBNY,” he says. “The market was terrible then and they barely had anyone at the banquet. They made me sit up front during the dinner to make it seem like people were here.”

6:30  Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney strides in. “I just secured us $300 million, a high-speed-rail grant to develop a line between Boston and New York. It’s very exciting,” she says, taking a crab leg. After she’s done with the morsel of meat, she holds the shell and looks for the waiter. “Where do I put this thing?”

6:32 The room’s cocktail banquet is about 75 percent full.

6:45 Robert Lapidus, an executive at the real estate investment company L&L Holding Company, becomes enraged when The Commercial Observer asks him if he is bidding on a leasehold interest in the Flatiron office building 114 Fifth Avenue, as is rumored. “We’re not here to talk about fucking business!” he yells, grabbing The CO’s notepad and tossing it.

Gary Green, head of the building services company Alliance, briskly and very politely retrieves the notebook while Mr. Lapidus hurls epithets at The CO. Acting like a true gentleman—and also looking the part in a finely cut tuxedo—Mr. Green apologizes for his friend. “You can’t do that! Knucklehead!” The CO overhears him say to Mr. Lapidus.

6:46  Kenneth Fisher, a partner at the real estate investment company Fisher Brothers, tells The CO that this is the first REBNY banquet he has been to in five years. “Every time this year, I’ve been playing golf in the desert [at the Bob Hope Classic].”7:00

Jeff Roseman, a retail leasing executive at Newmark Knight Frank, squeezes through the crowd. “It’s a great place to see old friends.” He greets Steve Green, the founder of the city’s biggest landlord, the REIT SL Green.

7:05 “This is my childhood,” Helena Durst, looking elegant in a flowing dress, says of the banquet. “Do you like Christmas? Do you like Sunday dinner? That’s what this is for me. I have so many memories of coming to this party.”

7:09 Deputy Mayor Robert Steel and Councilwoman Jessica Lapin walk through the room together, busy in conversation.

7:15 Guests are being pushed out of the cocktail reception into the main dining room. The dinner is about to begin.

7:16 “Do I like this party? It’s OK,” Kathryn Wylde, head of the Partnership for New York City, says. “I go to a lot of parties.”

7:25 The CO bumps into Woody Heller in the men’s room and mentions to him a rumor that Will Silverman, Mr. Heller’s colleague at Studley, doesn’t sit at a desk but stands. “It’s true,” Mr. Heller says. “He has a swivel desk that can be lifted and he stands at it rather than sits. He says it’s more comfortable.”

Does Mr. Heller do the same thing? “I pace,” Mr. Heller says.

7:40 The crowd, now dense, is heading into the main ballroom.

7:41 Bruce Mosler, a top leasing executive at Cushman & Wakefield, chats with friends outside the ballroom. “A lot of my good friends are in real estate, so this is a fun night for me, I get to see them all,” Mr. Mosler says.

7:42 Paul Pariser, a chief executive of the real estate investment company Taconic, stands nearby. Known as an avid skier, The CO asks him if he’s been to Colorado yet this season. “There’s no snow!” Mr. Pariser replies.

7:50 Howard Michaels, of the financing firm Carlton, is making his way into the ballroom. “If you’re in the real estate business and you’re not at this party, you have to have your head examined,” Mr. Michaels says. “Want to know something? I almost didn’t come. That was the pep talk I gave myself.”

8:00 Already murmurs are going around about where the after-parties are going to be. “I’m not going to an after-party,” says Bob Knakal, chairman of the brokerage firm Massey Knakal, which during the boom years threw epic REBNY parties. “I have dinner plans with my wife.”

8:05 Steve Berliner, an executive at the brokerage company Studley, flashes The CO a stack of his business cards, which he plans to hand out. “Tonight is the best recruiting night of the year,” he says. “I started getting recruited to Studley six years ago at this party.”

8:20 The CO tells Amira Yunis, a retail leasing executive at CBRE, that she looks stunning in her black dress. It’s true, the former model does. Asked what her plans for the year are, she jokingly grabs The CO by the shoulders and shakes, “Make millions and millions and millions of dollars!”

9:00 The ballroom is full. But few people are eating. In the center of the room, Mitch Arkin, an executive at C&W, is chatting. “I haven’t eaten yet,” Mr. Arkin says. “I’m not going to eat.” What is he using for fuel, a hungry CO asks. “Adrenaline.”

9:10 “After-party is at Nobu,” Matt Astrachan, an executive at Jones Lang LaSalle, tells his colleague Mitch Konsker and C&W retail executive Brad Mendelson. “JLL party at 10!” Mr. Mendelson booms.

9:15 Dessert is being served. Some kind of chocolate-coated-ball concoction. The CO is still looking for dinner, finds a steak and eats it. It’s not as rubbery as rumored, though it’s certainly overdone.

9:45  Steve Durels, SL Green leasing chief, and Paul Glickman, an agency leasing specialist at JLL, walk out chatting. The banquet is winding down.

10:00 Kent Swig, with a closely cropped beard and carrying a few extra pounds, makes his way out. “I’m having a beer,” he says.

dgeiger@observer.com

Matt Leon, a young and upcoming executive at the real estate services firm Newmark Knight Frank, will be taking over as head of the leasing team that represents TF Cornerstone’s collection of properties, which includes the midtown trophy building Carnegie Hall Tower, 645 Madison Avenue and 387 Park Avenue South.

Newmark's Matt Leon.

The substantial account had previously belonged to Billy Cohen, a top Newmark executive who had long worked with the firm, helping it fill Carnegie Hall Tower when that property was developed in the early 1990s as well as craft its image and place among Manhattan’s top high end office properties.

Mr. Leon had previously worked as an assistant to Mr. Cohen on the account. A person familiar with the situation said that Mr. Cohen was stepping down because of growing responsibilities tied to other agency assignments he handles, specifically buildings that he is working on with another large landlord; Malkin Properties. Mr. Cohen is a lead broker on a Newmark team that handles deals at the Empire State Building as well other Malkin assets.

The Empire State Building has attracted a number substantial leases recently that he has had a hand in arranging, including a 70,000 square foot lease with Human Rights Watch in recent weeks. Last year, he helped ink a deal for the Asian firm Li & Fung to take 500,000 square feet in the landmark tower.

Even though Mr. Cohen’s departure is amicable it still is a notable changing of the guard.

Mr. Cohen is one of Newmark’s top dealmakers and is considered a veteran of the real estate brokerage business. In recent years,though, it was Mr. Leon who had drawn much of the praise for his savvy minding of TF Cornerstone’s space. Before coming to Newmark, Mr. Leon had been a real estate attorney at what is widely considered the top practice in the city, Fried Frank.

“With his background in law, he can just cut right through deals,” a source said of Mr. Leon.

Neither Mr. Leon nor Mr. Cohen could be reached for comment by press time. TF Cornerstone also could not be reached.

Dan Geiger, Staff Writer, is reachable at Dgeiger@Observer.com

--UPDATED, 1:46 p.m.--

We tapped the top New York City real estate practices and asked them these questions.

Leonard Boxer

Stroock & Stroock & Lavan

“With the capital markets the way they are, every deal is complicated,” said Leonard Boxer, head of the real estate practice at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan. Now entering it’s ninth decade of practice, Stroock’s real estate group counts among its clients some of the most visible figures and institutions in Big Real Estate: Silverstein Properties, Wells Fargo, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, the Feil Organization and, what the heck, the Mets—while Mr. Boxer himself counsels the Real Estate Board of New York.

The legal landscape has changed permanently to favor attorneys with a real sense of business, he said. “Brokers are so knowledgeable; they will negotiate an L.O.I. so comprehensive … it will be, like, 100 pages.” An L.O.I. used to be a single page. “Today if a piece of property is available, there are rounds of bids. It’s almost like baseball,” Mr. Boxer said. “They don’t need just a good lawyer.”

In his role at REBNY, Mr. Boxer is also involved in all sorts of policy matters, particularly the fight in Albany this past spring over changes to rent regulations.

And despite being involved with the “most visible transaction, one we live with every day”—representing Silverstein at the World Trade Center site—Stroock remains involved in a number of lesser-known deals that have long girded its practice. For example, there was the recent sale of Liberty Towers, a 675-unit residential high-rise in Jersey City.

How did Mr. Boxer end up at Stroock, his firm since 1987? In the 1980s, while real estate transactions began to rival corporate transactions in volume, many small real estate firms were being bought up by the big guys. His boutique firm—Olnick, Boxer, Blumberg, Lane & Troy—was sought after, as was Mr. Boxer himself. But he was fiercely loyal to his people and would not budge on one matter: he wanted any buyer to take his whole firm, down to the mail room. “And, quite frankly, Stroock was the only firm that would do it.”

Raymond Sanseverino

Loeb & Loeb

“Time is the enemy of all transactions,” said Raymond Sanseverino, head of the real estate practice at Loeb & Loeb.

His practice of 50 attorneys stands apart for its responsiveness, according to Mr. Sanseverino. For instance, earlier this year, Loeb & Loeb negotiated more than 400,000 square feet at 120 Park Avenue for Bloomberg in only 12 days, after competing parties began vying for the space.

Loeb & Loeb also repped JPMorgan Chase as sublandlord in their vacating of 445,000 square feet at 245 Park; perfumer Coty in a huge lease at the Empire State Building; and the landlord at 875 Third Avenue in its 110,000-square-foot lease to Cerberus Capital.

Loeb & Loeb is also no stranger to unconventional requirements. They oversaw the Chinese state news agency Xinhua’s move to 2 Times Square, which required the State Department’s approval among myriad logistical challenges. But it all worked out smoothly in the end, with Xinhua leasing some quintessentially capitalistic real estate. “They’ll have a view of the ball dropping,” Mr. Sanseverino said.

“We know the market,” he added in explaining the practice’s approach in general. “We’re in it everyday.”

Aside from pricing, he advises clients on what provisions are realistic to ask for. These days, for instance, nondisturbance agreements are much easier to obtain and tenants are seeing more money for capital improvements. Mr. Sanseverino also believes in cool-headed negotiation. “These parties have to live together for 10, 15 years. There is never a need to scorch the earth.”

Richard Sussman and Michael Lefkowitz

Rosenberg & Estis

Representing huge developers in huge deals is not normally the work of a smaller firm. But for Rosenberg & Estis, a firm of 50 attorneys dedicated entirely to real estate, it has become not uncommon.

The firm has represented clients like the Durst and Brodsky organizations in large, complex deals, including, for Durst, the carefully watched 1 World Trade Center negotiation, as well as in quainter ones, like the CUNY School of Social Work lease at 118th and Third Avenue.

Among Rosenberg & Estis’s achievements this year was also the closure (finally!) of the financing for the no-longer-so-new Bank of America Tower at 1 Bryant Park. “It was a Herculean deal,” Mr. Sussman said. He said they essentially created an “integrated financial instrument” involving C.M.B.S.’s and Liberty Bonds. “This had never been done before, as I understand it.”

Rosenberg & Estis was also behind commercial debt fund RCG Longview, which was making predevelopment loans on sites like 180 Avenue of the Americas, at a time when more traditional lenders were keeping their distance. Enabling lenders like RCG greases the wheels of the commercial industry as a whole, according to Mr. Lefkowitz. “They have the advantage of being more nimble.”

So what is Rosenberg & Estis giving its clients beyond mere due diligence? “We actively work to structure everything. An economic situation which is not ‘vanilla’ requires a lot of work,” Mr. Sussman said. For instance, after the Durst Organization won the stake bid at 1 World Trade, “there was still a lot of dealmaking to be done,” said Mr. Lefkowitz. In the CUNY deal, the firm ended up using reversionary interest among other less orthodox tools. “We work with them from the earliest moment, especially with the off the market deals,” Mr. Sussman said.

Jay Neveloff

Kramer, Levin, Naftalis & Frankel

Mega-firm Kramer, Levin, Naftalis & Frankel closed tons of high-profile real estate transactions in 2011, including the sale of the upper portion of the old New York Times Building to Blackstone and the sale of St. Vincent’s to Rudin Management.

The year also has seen lots of stalled deals being recapitalized and lots of medium-size clients returning to the market, according to Jay Neveloff, head of Kramer Levin’s real estate practice. He says clients are more inclined to go to their attorney to make sure they have an accurate read on the market and that he is happy to oblige. “The top lawyers in the city are performing broader functions. You really get involved in the business of your clients.”

Kramer Levin boasts New York City’s largest land-use practice, with attorneys who have worked for the Department of City Planning, the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Parks Department. Currently, they represent Columbia University in its ongoing land-use negotiations in Harlem.

In the end, perhaps Kramer Levin’s size is its strongest asset for clients. “I have the ability, if I have clients who want to meet an owner, or make a joint venture, go to a bank,” Mr. Neveloff said, “I have the ability to open those doors. Or, if I don’t, I have someone in my office who can do that.”

Joseph Shenker

Sullivan & Cromwell

Did you know that real estate securitization structures were created by adapting commercial paper financing structures originally used for nuclear plants? Neither did The Commercial Observer, but this is the sort of knowledge one is treated to in conversation with Joseph Shenker, chairman of the real estate practice at Sullivan & Cromwell.

“We do high-end, sophisticated deals,” he said. “This justifies our fee structure.”

Sullivan & Cromwell has been behind some of the highest-profile debt restructurings of the last year, including at 280 Park Avenue, 1 Park Avenue, Independence Plaza in Tribeca, 230 Park Avenue and 666 Fifth Avenue. And with many properties in the city requiring some financial, uh, adjustments, they have lots to do. “When they are buying a complicated piece of mezz debt, they have all these questions,” Mr. Shenker explained. “[We] provide one-stop shopping.”

On 230 Park, for instance, the sale involved a deleveraging of the capital structure. “It amounted to Invesco putting in equity and paying down the total debt, a somewhat typical transaction” Tony Colletta, the lead counsel on the deal, said. On 280 Park, SL Green and Vornado pooled their acquired debt and added equity. It was “a complex and delicate transaction,” said Arthur Adler, another partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, who handled the deal.

The real estate cycle seems to provide such seemingly endless maneuvering for law firms. “The nice thing about New York real estate is you see the same buildings again and again,” Mr. Shenker said.

Jonathan Mechanic

Fried Frank

In teaching his real estate transactions class at Harvard Law, Jonathan Mechanic uses the Lipstick Building as a case study. Not only has he been involved in nearly every aspect of the building’s purchase, lease and debt repackaging—he repped Tishman Speyer in their original purchase; oversaw the lease to major tenant Latham & Watkins; repped Tishman Speyer in the next sale and then the Royal Bank of Canada in the building’s recent prepackaged bankruptcy—his conference room window looks out over it. The building, having had what Mr. Mechanic calls a “truncated life cycle,” represents the extremes of New York City real estate, and helps his students learn what he considers the most important lesson of real estate law: “To be a good lawyer you need to understand the business.”

The night before he spoke with The Commercial Observer, Mr. Mechanic, oft referred to as the most powerful real estate lawyer in the world, just happened to run into Frank Gehry and Bruce Ratner grabbing a drink at the Greenwich Hotel—for Mr. Mechanic, a typical evening in the business.

Mr. Mechanic has worked for Fried Frank since 1978, save for a five-year run as general counsel for developer Howard Ronson. This year alone has seen Fried Frank work on deals that are not just significant for their size but for the impact they will have on the city. Mr. Mechanic repped Condé Nast in its move to 1 World Trade Center, in “a total collaborative effort,” among the Durst Organization, the publisher and the Port Authority. Just recently, Fried Frank was involved in the Whitney’s move downtown; the recently finished 8 Spruce Street, designed by Mr. Gehry and developed by Mr. Rather; and Google’s purchase of 111 Eighth Avenue.

And what of the near future? Mr. Mechanic says to look for redevelopment of the South Street Seaport, lots of deals at the Hudson Yards and a vibrant market for retail and office space near the World Trade Center.

Neil Rock

Skadden Arps

No list of top real estate practices would be complete without the inclusion of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom.

Among their notable transactions of late? There was SL Green’s debt restructuring at 280 Park Avenue; the Helmsley Charitable Trust’s sale of the Helmsley Hotel for $314 million; and, of course, the 20-year lease for Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale and Dorr LLP’s new space at 7 World Trade Center. That lease was the first to use Mayor Bloomberg’s new “green lease language,” which lets tenants and owners share the cost of energy efficiency upgrades.

Neil Rock, head of Skadden Arps’s real estate practice, is the type of real estate attorney whose projects alter the very landscape of the city. He represents the Empire State Development Corporation, the state’s economic development arm, in connection with Atlantic Yards and the New York Convention Center Development Corporation regarding the Jacob Javits Center and of the High Line. Little surprise, then, that Forbes calls Skadden Arps “Wall Street’s most powerful” law firm. The real estate, practice, appears to be no slouch either.

Bill McInerney and Steve Herman

Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft LLP

Bill McInerney heads a real estate practice that is not at all shy about its aptitude on the financial side of real estate deals. “We can originate the asset, but also have the expertise to exit the asset” in various ways, including the private market, Mr. McInerney said. “As the market rebounds, we are in a position to take advantage.”

Together with Steve Herman, head of the bank finance practice, Mr. McInerney sees a bright next couple of years. Not only did Cadwalader not slash its staff as so many firms did post-Lehman, they specialize in the types of deals that will be most in demand in the coming years. “There is $100 billion in debt that is overleveraged,” Mr. Herman said. So the real estate industry will be seeing “restructuring for years to come.” Their “soup to nuts,” practice, as Mr. McInerney calls it, deals end to end with origination, securitization and sale of real estate debt, as in the recent case of the Extended Stay Hotels portfolio.

Cadwalader was the firm most active in commercial mortgage back securities … you know, back before the CMBS crash in 2009. “I’ve lived through multiple cycles in this industry,” Mr. Herman said. And he believes anyone overly upset by the current debacle is simply revealing how young they are. “Last downturn, there were many more bankruptcies and contested foreclosures. Since then, we’ve developed structures to mitigate that, and they’ve had the desired effect.”

Martin Miner

Holland Knight

If you have a hotel to sell, or some money to invest in the hospitality industry, say, Holland Knight might be a nice fit.

The firm has worked with Marriott, Starwood and BD Hotels, as well as on the sales of boutique hotels. They have also repped big clients in commercial leases, construction and development, including the Empire State Development Corporation, Clarion Partners and Jetblue (in its recent office move to Long Island City).

Martin Miner, head of the real estate practice, has over 30 years of experience in the field. Asked what he offers clients nowadays, he answered without hesitation: “Great personalities.” And The Commercial Observer can attest to Mr. Miner’s charm. In a world of cold, calculated financial maneuvers, a warm personality goes a long way.

Mr. Miner has in the past lent his charm to a class on real estate transactions at Columbia’s business school. “I try to tell them that the market doesn’t always go up,” he said of his students. “I try to tell them that in today’s real estate world, corporate law and real estate law are very close. You need to have both to be accomplished today.”

Ron Sernau and David Weinberger

Proskauer Rose

This real estate duo pride themselves on teamwork and on the individual expertise each brings to the table. Sound cliché? So be it, according to David Weinberger. With him on the lender’s side and Ron Sernau on the borrower’s, their firm has worked on some massive deals in the last year—repping Vornado (a frequent client) at 1 Park Avenue; CBRE Investors in its purchase of 1540 Broadway; Harbor Group at 4 New York Plaza; and their own firm in their recent move to 11 Times Square, where Mr. Sernau analogizes his firm to “the shoemaker’s children, with holes in their shoes.”

With expertise on both sides of a transaction, Mr. Sernau sees Proskauer attorneys as “a part of the brokerage process,” not simply as legal advisers. That involves risk, of course, but risk is part of the inherent beauty of real estate for Mr. Sernau. For example, Proskauer recently represented Harry Macklowe in his return to the real estate stage: the purchase of 150 East 72nd street, which closed in June. “He has the chutzpah to put down his money when the rest of us are running away,” Mr. Sernau said.

What sets Proskauer apart in Mr. Weinberger’s view is how business is never proprietary at his firm. Regardless of who brings in business—he or she, and yes, approximately half Proskauer’s partners are women!—the person with the best qualifications works on a deal. “We get the best talent for the task,” Mr. Weinberger said.

Kenneth Fisher

Cozen O’Connor

When it comes to experience navigating the myriad interconnections that run this town, it’s hard to beat 10 years on the City Council. One meets the right people and gets to know how things really work. Kenneth Fisher of Cozen O’Connor, who specializes in real estate development, zoning and land-use matters, brings just that political capital to the table.

He is the man to call when dealing with any of the many labyrinthine city commissions, panels and approval processes that are part of every bigger Gotham real estate deal, even, somehow, the as-of-right ones.

No stranger to controversy, as he has represented clients like landlord the Pinnacle Group, The Real Deal once called Mr. Fisher “the go-to-guy for real estate clients embroiled in contentious projects.”

Mr. Fisher, who has analogized real estate in New York City to oil in Saudi Arabia, has retained his focus on public real estate policy since his move back to private practice. He is a founding chair of the board of directors of the Governors Island Alliance, a nonprofit redeveloping that public space, on whose board he continues to serve, and represents a number of nonprofits in their legal negotiations.

gvoien@observer.com

Mr. Sorin has been a partner at Fried Frank since 1997.

It was back in 2006, during a streak of economic buoyancy, that Google, then only eight years old, paid $319 million for an office complex on Amphitheatre Avenue in Mountain View, Calif., that would soon become known to all as the Googleplex.

Since then, the empire that Larry Page and Sergey Brin built has expanded to include 68 addresses in Canada, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the United States and even the Middle East. In 2010, the company reported that its total assets had reached a whopping $57.9 billion. So it wasn’t a surprise last December when Google signed a contract to buy 111 Eighth Avenue, one of New York City’s largest office buildings. Nor did anyone blanch when the closing price of $1.8 billion turned out to be the largest of the year—not just in Manhattan, but in the entire country.

But for Robert Sorin, an attorney with Fried Frank’s real estate practice who represented Google in that deal, what remains most surprising of all is that an outfit that shares a tax bracket with the most profitable companies in the world wound up applying for a loan.

“Here you had a company that’s got, I don’t know, 30-something billion in cash—and the typical clients that most real estate lawyers deal with hardly ever have that kind of luxury,” Mr. Sorin said. “The interesting, unique thing for me was representing a client who I literally had to … It was the first time in my career I’ve ever had to convince a client to take a loan on a property.”

For Mr. Sorin, an attorney with nearly 30 years of experience and a client log augmented by Chase Manhattan Bank, Macklowe Properties and Goldman Sachs, the reasons for Google to get a property loan were simple enough.

Without the loan—if, in other words, the company had paid for the building in an all-cash transaction—it would have lost the financial benefits that come from a mortgage recording tax that had already been paid off by the property’s previous owners. With a $500 million mortgage, that benefit, according to the lawyer, equated to $15 million.

“You might think in the context of a $1.8 billion deal that $15 million isn’t significant—and in a way to them it’s not—but it really is,” Mr. Sorin said. “But once I got them to focus on that, and to realize there was this asset that they could keep—after it went up the corporate ladder up there they finally decided, ‘Yeah, you know what, I think it’s a good idea for us to go get a loan.’”

It’s the almost counterintuitive strategies like the one he devised for Google that have earned the lawyer a top spot at Fried Frank, where since 1997 he has served as a partner in its well-regarded real estate practice.

And yet, in a legal niche where many competitors have inched increasingly toward specialization—exclusively focusing on, say, distressed assets or loan sales—Mr. Sorin, 53, describes himself as a generalist. In other words, he’s a jack-of-all-trades who has taken on hotel, mixed-use and retail assets, joint ventures, commercial mortgages, mezzanine financing and myriad debt restructurings, to name only a few. Call him a renaissance lawyer.

Further evidence? Mr. Sorin’s involvement with the Apple store at the base of the General Motors Building; the acquisition and leaseback of the HSBC headquarters at 452 Fifth Avenue; the huge 2008 sale of said GM Building, which at $2.9 billion was the highest paid for a U.S. office property; and Chase Manhattan’s multibillion-dollar divestment of the bank’s entire loan and R.E.O. real estate portfolio.

“I really have a very diverse practice in terms of the type of work I do and the types of clients that I represent,” said the married, Short Hills, N.J., father of two, slapping fresh meaning to the word “modesty.” “For me, it makes this all the more interesting and all the more fun.”

Among the assignments he considers his most interesting, he said, was his 2010 deal on behalf of the IDB Group, which, as Israel’s largest conglomerate, reflects an estimated 10 percent of the country’s G.D.P. The deal, he said, involved the acquisition and leaseback of 452 Fifth, the 850,000-square-foot building that houses HSBC’s New York headquarters. At the time, dear reader, you’ll recall that the downturn had come.

In that assignment, Mr. Sorin’s client, the IDB Group, sought to purchase the asset—but, in a wicked twist, it evolved into a complicated leaseback transaction for HSBC Bank, which had been the owner and user of the property.

Despite IDB’s tremendous capital, Mr. Sorin faced issues that included leasing back portions of the building on a short-term basis and other portions on a long-term basis. On floors 12 through 29, for example, he is already actively leasing office space. On those soon-to-be renovated floors, he is already heading up leasing. On the bottom floors, leases are longer and will remain occupied by HSBC.

“It all brought forth acquisition-type work, financing-type work and all the leasing-type work,” Mr. Sorin said. “It’s another example of a lot of those different types of work that a single transaction—if you’re representing the owner of the site—brings to bear.”

Like most toiling in real estate, however, Mr. Sorin felt the downturn—acutely. As he describes it, the demand on his time went from intense to thumb-twiddling in a flash. “It’s funny, but during those heydays I had this printout of a list of all the big matters. I just had so many matters going on at the same time that I had to have a printout of each one so I could kind of keep status of what I had to do on each matter—and it got to be that it was 25 matters at the same time. But when the world turned, I didn’t need the list anymore.

“But the interesting thing is, literally in the last month, I’ve had to recreate that list again,” he added, smiling. “Just because I guess I have so many things happening right now. It’s busy again.”

jsederstrom@observer.com

Mr. Levy: There are two basic types of distress. One [comes from a weakness in fundamentals], which is a weakness in the rent roll, weakness in the underlying credit of your tenants, decreasing [net operating income], increasing expenses. Basically, the value of the asset goes down because the value of your income stream goes down. … Category number two is an asset that might have fairly good fundamentals but because of capital markets constraints might be going through distress, because [its owners] can’t refinance their debt. … [Right now] the problem is almost entirely related to the second category of distress, which is capital markets. There’s just very little debt and equity capital out there to refinance these assets.

 
Everyone and their mother seems to have formed some sort of distressed-asset group. Where are all of these assets coming from?

The way it’s going down is very straightforward. The first level of distress was residential, single-family houses. And then as that problem became worse, it affected the capital markets and then started getting into the commercial asset classes. The first commercial asset class to get hit was land and development deals. As the capital market conditions continued to weaken, you started to see some distress in some of the core asset types. We haven’t seen a lot of it yet, but some of the core asset types that are beginning to show more weakness than others would include retail, hotels and flex industrial. And then if you take a look at certain markets outside of Manhattan, there are obviously pockets of weakness in some of the places like Las Vegas, Orange Country, Calif., Miami—places that had a significant bubble, particularly on the residential side.

 
So who are you working for besides the F.D.I.C. thus far?

We’re trying to focus in the beginning on just financial institutions; so, banks, insurance companies, [savings and loans] and special servicers. … We have an assignment out in California for IndyMac, which is one of the larger banks that, unfortunately, failed. … But in addition to that, our most active group this year in finance is our loan sales group.

 
So do you have any thoughts on how this is different from the Resolution Trust Corporation days of the late 1980s and early 1990s?

Do you want me to keep it simple?

 
None of this is particularly simple.

Everything is different. But I can say that from going into this recession, real estate fundamentals from a supply-demand standpoint are far stronger today than they were then—particularly in places like Manhattan, where you did not see a tremendous amount of overbuilding.

 
Of commercial real estate?

Of commercial real estate. Now, I think the situation may be different in residential. And that’s certainly the leading edge, and it’s all related. At the end of the day, the same person that was buying [residential mortgage-backed] securities was the same person who was buying [commercial mortgage-backed] securities. They got burned on one, and now they feel they got burned on both. Historically, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people thought that residential and commercial real estate were not linked. Ultimately, this time, that was proven incorrect.

 
Simply because the same people who were buying the RMBS were buying CMBS?

That’s probably the biggest reason. I mean, what you’re dealing with here is a complete collapse of the CMBS industry.

 
So it’s not that the fundamentals underlying the CMBS market weren’t strong. It’s that there’s absolutely no demand anymore for CMBS?

Correct. And the investors won’t buy. Now, I will note it’s fair to say the CMBS underwriting got far more aggressive in the last two years, 2006, 2007, than they were prior to that. So there was certainly some weakness from the fundamentals standpoint in the underwriting of those loans. But, at the same time, the fundamentals of real estate until even today, are relatively strong, but certainly getting weaker in some of the obvious points, particularly retail and hotels.

 
Were you surprised by the enormity of this crisis?

I think everybody was. There’s obviously a lot of ways to characterize how things got so bad so fast. But I think the common knowledge, which I think is correct, is pre-Lehman and post-Lehman. When Lehman went down, that was the straw, the very large straw, that broke the camel’s back.

 
Even if they had saved Lehman, the underlying flaws in the system were still there.

Without a doubt. Underwriting of loans got to be too aggressive, from a loan-to-value standpoint, too aggressive in terms of interest rates. But at the end of the day, it was still being done with very strong real estate fundamentals.

 
So let’s talk about Manhattan commercial real estate. What do you think is going to replace …

… CMBS debt that’s no longer here?

 
Well, that’s a good question that I wasn’t going to ask.

Sorry. That’s like a politician in an interview [who is asked], ‘So Scott, how’s the weather today?’ ‘Well, let me tell you about my health care policy.’

 
What do you think will replace CMBS debt?

In the early ’90s, nobody thought that anything would come in to replace the broken [savings and loans]. And CMBS came in to replace that. Here today, people are like, ‘What’s going to replace CMBS?’ Something will replace it. … Number one, the banks are going to take more risk onto their balance sheets with respect to a piece of the security. Number two, private-equity firms, at least short-term, are going to step in to do it. Number three, insurance companies are going to get healthier again and they’ll be able to get back to historical lending standards. The issue is going to be the volume of the capital.

 
What I was going to ask is what sort of tenants will occupy the space once belonging to the financial services industry and the hedge funds?

New York’s economy has gotten far more skewed toward the financial services industry the past 25 or 30 years than obviously ever before. Will a new industry come in to take its place? It’s very hard to say. But I would suspect that given the infrastructure, the human capital of the New York City market, I’m very confident that some of the traditional industries will ultimately fill that void.

 
Is it safe to say we’re just at the preliminary stages of all of this unwinding?

Yes, and what’s interesting about it is, I’ve been … meeting with a lot of investors. … I’ve handed a lot of these investors a white sheet of paper and said, ‘O.K., you’ve got capital. Please write for me on this white sheet of paper what you will buy.’ … When it comes right down to it, very few of them can fill out that piece of paper, notwithstanding how much cash they have, because there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty out there.

 
So, when are we going to see this deluge of hard distressed assets, distressed skyscrapers and the like, coming to the market?

My answer is, hopefully never. But if the fundamentals continue to weaken, if the capital market conditions continue to stay frozen, it may not be for another six to nine months, maybe longer. Because the same thing that got us into this problem, or one of the things that got us into this problem, was overaggressive lending. It’s also the same thing that’s protecting us from falling faster, because overaggressive lending means that they lent at higher loan-to-values than you are going to get today and at lower rates. And a lot of this paper doesn’t come due till 2015 or 2016, so a lot of the problem may be deferred six or seven years out.

 
By which point the economy presumably will have recovered?

Presumably.

drubinstein@observer.com

Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn calls this a "shell game," considering how the money that Forest City is saving on EDC-approved uses like land acquisition can be spent lobbying state and city officials (and because a lot of the city money is going to the state because the railyards will cost $100 million).

The Real Estate thinks the big winner in all of this is lobbying firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, which received $656,520 for its efforts. Among other targets listed in its lobbying report are "acquisition of Altantic Avenue railyards from MTA" and "acquisition of city-owned property at Atlantic Yards."

Apparently, Mr. Fried and Mr. Frank persuaded Forest City that it needed their help persuading the state and the city to do things that they pledged when they signed a memorandum of understanding (PDF) back in 2005, and for a sweet price.

In its registration letter filed with the state lobbying commission, Forest City agreed to pay up to $995 an hour for Fried Frank's services.

- Matthew Schuerman