Five New L.A. Real Estate Partners Featured in the GlobeSt.com
"Seyfarth Shaw Expands Real Estate Law Practice"

The five real estate lawyers who joined the firm this week were featured in the October 2, 2008 GlobeSt.com article, "Seyfarth Shaw Expands Real Estate Law Practice." The article reported that the addition of these new partners represents the continued nationwide growth of Seyfarth's real estate law practice. According to the article, the new attorneys will broaden and deepen the firm's capabilities in workouts, foreclosures and other specialties for which demand is expected to increase as a result of changing market and economic conditions. Maura O'Connor explained that Seyfarth’s management has focused on “expanding the real estate team in a way that will work both in up cycles and in down cycles.” Maura also noted that, “One of the reasons that this group was very attractive to our firm is that we are, with the addition of Dean’s workout experience, adding to our firm’s ability to handle distressed asset transactions such as workouts, mezzanine workouts and foreclosures."

J. Dean Heller, who has specialized in hospitality deals over the past 10 years, including some of the industry’s largest, and also has been active in the workout arena over the years, observed that “Workout work has been out of fashion until recently, but it’s about to take center stage again.”  In addition to his work in the hotel industry, Dean has been representing investors in mezzanine debt positions since about 1999, when, as he pointed out, “structured finance first became a significant factor in the market.” He noted that one of the differences between this down cycle and previous downturns is that, in earlier down cycles, “The loans that we were working out were pretty much straight mortgage loans with a single lender or a syndicate of lenders.” Today, however, the CMBS world and the many varieties of structured finance deals have created complex capital stacks that will make workouts significantly more complicated than in previous cycles, Dean said.

Mark A. Block, chair of Seyfarth Shaw's nationwide Real Estate Practice Group, commented that the new lawyers bring "strengths in everything from real estate investment funds to commercial property development and acquisition and disposition of commercial and industrial real estate portfolios.” The areas of expertise that the new team brings, Mark said, “complement those strengths that we've been developing in our real estate practice nationally."