Shapiro, Lifschitz & Schram

Our team’s combined experience and skill enables us to handle all types of real estate matters, including sales and acquisitions of commercial office buildings, shopping centers, hotels, marinas, land, multi-family housing and mixed-use projects; financing of real estate projects; joint venture agreements; and commercial office and retail leasing for both landlords and tenants.

When it comes to any real estate need, we have our clients covered. Our representation extends to the preparation and negotiation of all required documents, assistance in the "due diligence" process - including the review and analysis of title and survey - and representation at settlement. We also have comprehensive experience representing owners and tenants of buildings and shopping centers in the negotiation, drafting, interpretation and enforcement of leases and subleases. Lawyers in our real estate group have also been extensively involved in restructuring commercial loan portfolios for some of the Beltway’s largest homebuilders and other real estate related companies and investors. We have represented commercial banks, credit companies, life companies, savings banks and the FDIC and RTC in commercial foreclosures, deeds-in-lieu transactions, workouts, and recapitalizations. Additionally, we have assisted non-real estate commercial borrowers in the negotiation of forbearance agreements and debt restructurings. Because we value their time and resources, our clients appreciate that we don’t educate “junior” associates at their expense. Rather, each client receives the real deal – senior level representation. It is because of our wealth of experience that we can and do deliver innovative and creative solutions for even the most complicated issues. We’ve been around the block a time or two, so when it comes to commercial real estate, if a challenge or obstacles exists, chances are we’ve seen it before and can solve it.

Being passionate about what we do also means listening to our client’s goals and working collaboratively with them to develop a strategy geared towards achieving their goals. Our own goal for our clients is simple: to exceed their expectations, every time, and to get the transaction closed.

To be successful at this, we often provide legal counsel that extends far beyond the typical and traditional client/lawyer relationship. Our clients have come to rely on us for thoughtful and insightful analysis of all aspects of the deal, and beyond that, they know that we keep their legal and overall business objectives in mind at all times. This level of attention requires that we truly understand our clients’ businesses since they frequently rely on us for more than just one transaction. When it comes to our clients, our passion makes it possible.

• A customer of a large regional bank had an opportunity to purchase four separate parcels of real estate from a public utility company, located in Maryland and the District of Columbia. The properties were diverse and consisted of a suburban office building 100% leased to the United States government; a downtown property operated as a restaurant and office building; raw land zoned for residential development; and a long-term ground lease of land zoned for commercial development in the NOMA district of Washington, DC Knowing that timing was critical to its customer, the bank turned to us to prepare the loan commitments; to perform due diligence on title, survey and leasing issues; to document the loans for all four properties; and to supervise the closing. All four transactions closed simultaneously, less than five weeks after we began work. The bank and the borrower were both delighted with our dedication and extreme efficiency.
• We represented the seller in a $45 million stock sale involving a large stone quarry operation in West Virginia with additional mineral rights and other assets in suburban Maryland. The purchaser was a multi-national public company based in the U.K. We deftly bridged the considerable culture gap between the Appalachian miners and the European businessmen, and by almost continuous negotiations, were able to hammer out a complex agreement, start to finish, over the Thanksgiving holiday. Since a transaction of this type involves (among other things) real estate, employee contracts, permits, mineral rights, equipment, vehicles and environmental issues, there is usually a period of several months between contract execution and closing. Since our client had a timing issue, the deal was closed over the Christmas holiday in a round-the-clock session. The purchaser was so impressed that they hired the firm for their next U.S. acquisition and future operations.

Our clients also rely on our ability to structure a transaction or a project in a way that protects them from liability while maximizing flexibility. For example:

• Through various entities controlled by three generations of family members, a client owned a large tract of property, including a lake, underground caverns, a museum, commercial and industrial property, Civil War battlefield relics, and property zoned for residential development. The property had been acquired over a period of 50 years, with no substantive planning for how development would actually occur. Numerous challenges faced our client, including the fact that the residential land had limited frontage and could not be developed efficiently, while the museum had good frontage but little development potential. Another issue was that easements to access the underground caverns could cast a cloud on title to the individual houses to be constructed on the residential land. Our team came together to form solutions, and over a period of several months, working with each generation of the family, we restructured the clients’ holdings so that the land could be developed efficiently without damaging the cultural, historical and personal significance of the other properties.