Practice Group Leaders: Terri L. Adler,  Kirk L. Brett and Bruce M. Stachenfeld

No Client Left Behind

The Firm's Pure Play model makes us unique in having expertise throughout all sides and angles of the debt and equity capital stacks.  This is useful at all times, but invaluable in workouts and restructurings, when the easy-to-assemble pieces of a deal need to be morphed and reconstituted.

Our Distressed Real Estate Practice Group combines our team of battle-tested attorneys that bring together our expertise in litigation, bankruptcy, real estate workouts of all types and from all sides, and tax.  The Distressed Real Estate Practice Group consists of partners and senior lawyers, many of whose tenure at the Firm stretches back to the last financial downturn and even downturns before that. 

During the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, our Distressed Real Estate Practice Group worked out billions of dollars of deals, ranging from major loan purchases, restructurings, tranche warfare, put-back cases, foreclosures, partnership disputes, and much more.  Indeed, we were one of the industry leaders in distressed real estate, and there was little we didn't encounter on behalf of our clients. We were extremely proud that all (yes all) of our clients made it through the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, and most of them are still happily in business today.  Of course, they did the great underwriting, but we steered them through the shoals.  We have every intention of doing the exact same thing today during this pandemic; hence, our title No Client Left Behind. 

Distressed Real Estate

We focus our team on the following legal areas in which we have specialized expertise:

• Hotels (including workouts, restructurings, bankruptcies and other protective measures)
• Retail and Leasing (including lease workout and insolvency situations, co-working)
• Debt Matters from Lender Side (including workouts, restructurings, buying/selling defaulted debt, tranche warfare, intercreditor disputes, opportunistic lending, A/B loan structures, and rescue capital)
• Debt Matters from Borrower Side (including protecting our clients from predatory lenders, workouts, restructurings, and rescue capital)
• Joint Ventures and Platforms (including partnership disputes, recapitalizations of joint ventures and platforms)
• Workouts, Litigation, and Bankruptcy (including prosecuting and defending foreclosures both of mortgages and UCC foreclosures of mezzanine loans, and failure to fund cases)
• Corporate/company level/platform recapitalizations and restructurings (including both public and private markets, including PIPE's and REIT's)
• Tax-driven transactions (including (today) opportunity zone transactions needing repair)
• Family Offices (including opportunities for family offices and saving the day on existing investments)
• Non-Profit/Tax Exempt (including unique issues hitting this endangered industry and how to turn lemons into lemonade)
• Real Estate Technology (including restructuring and recapitalizing troubled companies through joint ventures and rescue capital)
• Our (Friendly) Distressed Real Estate HUB – set up recently to match up distressed situations with those with rescue capital [link]