"When you’ve built an institution with values and a purpose beyond just making money – when you’ve built a culture that makes a distinctive contribution while delivering exceptional results – why would you surrender to the forces of mediocrity and succumb to irrelevance……The best corporate leaders never point out the window to blame external conditions; they look in the mirror and say, “We are responsible for our results!” Those who take personal credit but blame external events in bad times simply do not deserve to lead our institutions. "
-Jim Collins 2008



Bruce Stachenfeld is one of the nation’s preeminent real estate attorneys. He is a founding partner of the Firm, the founder of the Firm’s high-profile Real Estate Practice Group, and he also acts as the Firm’s Managing Partner. Mr. Stachenfeld is known to be one of the most “connected” real estate lawyers throughout the worldwide real estate community. He is also a thought leader in both the law firm and real estate worlds.

As a lawyer, Mr. Stachenfeld has over 30 years of real estate law experience encompassing tens of billions of dollars of real estate transactions of all kinds. As a real estate lawyer, Mr. Stachenfeld distinguishes himself by seeking out areas of real estate law that are more difficult and in which he and his team can provide particular value. In this vein:

Mr. Stachenfeld is particularly known also for representing clients in partnerships, limited liability companies and other co-venture situations. Indeed, Mr. Stachenfeld and the partners who have worked with him for many years have developed one of the premier real estate joint venture practices in New York City. This includes representing institutional investors, operators, and platform, strategic and other investors in U.S. and cross-border international transactions.


Mr. Stachenfeld, and his real estate team, are particularly known for representing clients in co-venture transactions (including platform transactions and programmatic, preferred equity, common equity and other corporate real estate type transactions).

Mr. Stachenfeld has also represented clients in bankruptcies, workouts and insolvencies in each of the real estate downturns of the past 30 years. Mr. Stachenfeld applied his real estate expertise in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s to numerous bankruptcy, insolvency and workout matters by working in close conjunction with the bankruptcy departments of Latham & Watkins and Mayer Brown during his tenures at those law firms. Additionally, Mr. Stachenfeld commenced his career with a one-year stint as a litigation attorney. Finally, Mr. Stachenfeld rounded himself out by spending time as in-house general counsel for a shopping center development company. Hopefully it is not an overstatement to describe Mr. Stachenfeld as the “perfect lawyer” for a distressed real estate situation.