The Cathay LEGAL network member in
Duval & Stachenfeld LLP
“Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.”
Duval & Stachenfeld has determined to focus all of the Firm’s practices around our core expertise in real estate. Notably, we now have roughly 50 full-time real estate lawyers, which enable us to take pride in the fact that we now have one of the largest and most diverse real estate practices in New York City. Additionally, we have strong practices in litigation, tax, corporate, bankruptcy, and not-for-profit. We enhance all of these practice areas through the adjunct of the powerful Pure Play Real Estate practice. We are committed to helping our clients build and protect their businesses. We believe that our clients simply love to have lawyers who not only do excellent legal work, but also work to help them build their businesses. This includes making critical connections, thinking of critical insights, and truly adding value to them in their most important goal; namely, being successful in the business world. On the litigation side, this means a commitment to not only winning litigation when it occurs, but also working with our clients to ensure that litigation does not occur in the first place, or if it does, our clients are well protected from adverse outcomes.
Flagship deals
- Our Mission to Help Our Clients Grow Their Businesses: There is another aspect to working with our firm that bears mention and this is our mission to “Help Our Clients Grow Their Businesses.” This is a unique value-add that distinguishes us from other law firms. Instead of “only” looking to send bills to our clients, we also spend a great deal of time on what our clients often need more than anything else; namely, assistance in growing their real estate businesses successfully. This includes, by way of example, helping clients find transactions, financial partners, investors and other counterparties. This has resulted in several billion dollars of transactions in the past few years, including close to $1B of deals ongoing right now. If you are wondering, we do not get a fee for this – we do it solely to help our clients build their businesses. Our clients love that we do this. We believe this could be of great use the Cathay Network.
- Harvard Lawyers: We try to hire lawyers from the top law schools in the world. Indeed, the heads of our Tax, Litigation, and Not-For-Profit Practices, and the founder of our Real Estate practice, are all graduates of Harvard Law School. In addition, in a statistic that we don’t know what to make of, by happenstance, over 25% of the equity partners in the Firm are graduates of Harvard Law School. We suspect this is probably more than any other law firm of significant size.
- High-Quality Clients We Are Proud To Represent: Our client base includes private equity funds, sovereign wealth funds, family offices, CMBS lenders, mezzanine lenders, developers, REITs, insurance companies, servicers, and other players. Sample clients include: ACORE Capital; Almanac Realty Investors; Angelo, Gordon & Co.; Barings Real Estate Barclays Bank; Cantor Commercial Real Estate; Caribbean Property Group; Cerberus Real Estate; Colony NorthStar, Inc. (formerly known as NorthStar Realty Finance Corp.); Dune Real Estate Partners; Equity Office Properties; Extell Realty; Fisher Brothers; Jamestown; Lightstone Group; Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets, Inc.; Meritage Properties; Nan Fung; New York Life Insurance Company; Och Ziff; RXR Realty; Safra Bank; Savanna; StepStone Global; Starwood Property Trust; Terra Capital Partners; TH Real Estate; Toll Brothers; and one of the largest Middle-Eastern Sovereign Wealth Funds; by way of example.
- High Profile and Complex Matters: Anyone can claim to be the “best” at anything; however, in New York City circles we are well-known to be one of the top real estate practices. We are regularly retained for major, high-profile transactions in NYC and nationwide, including, for example, in NYC: The Carlton House; Chelsea Market; Industry City; 375 Pearl Street; 100 Varick Street; and NorthStar Realty Finance Corp.’s acquisition of an ownership interest in RXR’s $6.5B 108-property NYC portfolio.
- Corporate/Joint Ventures/Platforms: The Firm has deep expertise in corporate transactions involving joint ventures, platforms and other structures. This includes everything from simple joint ventures to highly complex and complicated platform-type transactions. As described in more detail below, this area is our “sweetest sweet spot”.