Los Angeles is the second-largest city in the United States and the center of one of the world's largest urban agglomerations. Los Angeles County, which encompasses Los Angeles and several of its suburbs, is home to nearly 55,000 lawyers as of 2015, thousands of whom practice real estate law. These professionals handle all kinds of legal matters arising from ownership of real property. They handle real estate transactions, negotiate leases, litigate property disputes and consult on land use laws, among other activities.

The lawyers detailed on this list rate among the city's best options in a variety of specialty practice areas. They each bring a record of experience and performance, boasting high ratings from former clients. However, there are many other competent, high-performing real estate lawyers operating across Los Angeles. Keep in mind that this list should serve only as an initial step in your search. To identify the right lawyer to handle your specific legal issue, it is important to speak to at least several promising candidates to get a real sense of who has the right experience, expertise and character to handle your business real estate lawer.

David Tabibian

David Tabibian handles real estate transactions for developers, investors, high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs), landlords, commercial banks and other clients with high-value projects. He oversees all aspects of real estate transactions and has drafted complex purchase and sales agreements, loan documents, commercial leases and settlement agreements. Tabibian has experience handling real estate projects of all kinds, including hotels, retail and office buildings, single-family and multifamily residential properties, industrial projects and mixed-use developments. Tabibian is a senior associate attorney in the real estate department at Glaser Weil Fink Howard Avchen & Shapiro, one of the nation's top full-service law firms. He works at the firm's main office in the Century City neighborhood of Los Angeles and has practiced law since 2007.

Zachary D. Schorr

Zachary D. Schorr is an experienced litigator who specializes in real estate disputes. He handles virtually all disputes arising in the residential and commercial real estate arena, including purchase and sale disputes, commercial lease disputes, easement disputes, commercial evictions, residential landlord-tenant disputes and many other types of legal issues. Shore has practiced law in Los Angeles for 13 years. The Schorr Law office is located in the Sawtelle area of the city.

Deborah R. Bronner

Deborah R. Bronner is an experienced real estate lawyer offering a range of services for distressed families struggling to keep their homes. Bronner represents parties facing eviction, litigates wrongful foreclosures and handles bankruptcies, short sales and debt settlement negotiations. Apart from her work with distressed homeowners, Bronner also provides a full range of real estate transaction services and offers commercial lease review and negotiation services. She has been practicing law in Los Angeles and Southern California for 28 years. Her office is located in the Los Angeles suburb of Culver City.

Melissa C. Marsh

Melissa C. Marsh has 19 years of experience practicing real estate and business law in Los Angeles. She handles all transactional aspects of residential and commercial property sales, negotiates and drafts commercial and residential lease agreements and construction contracts, and represents parties involved in landlord-tenant disputes. Marsh also handles condominium and homeowners association disputes and represents landowners involved in boundary-line disputes. Marsh's law offices are located in the Sherman Oaks area of Los Angeles.

Pankaj S. Raval

Pankaj S. Raval is a business and real estate lawyer with special expertise in landlord-tenant disputes. Raval has experience representing interests and rights on both sides of the landlord-tenant relationship. His primary focus is on mediating disputes to bring about mutually agreeable solutions while protecting the rights and interests of his clients. Raval also handles commercial lease negotiations and provides lease review services. He has practiced law in Los Angeles for five years. He started his legal career in Arizona and maintains an active license to practice in the state. Raval's law offices are located in the U.S. Bank Tower in downtown Los Angeles.

 commercial real estate development in Pasadena was beset by costly delays, and a major investor in the project -- a prominent TV producer -- was fed up, hiring a high-priced New York attorney to wrest control from the developer.

A meeting was called. Phillip R. Nicholson, one of the senior attorneys for the developer, had a simple strategy: Just listen to what the New York lawyer said. Don’t argue. When the lawyer finished with a string of harsh demands, Nicholson asked for time to think it over.

At the office later, Nicholson directed attorney Mario Camara to look up a particular section in the California penal code. He then asked Camara to draft a letter to the New York lawyer citing that section -- and pointing out that extortion was illegal in California.

The threats went away, Camara said. The episode, which occurred three decades ago, was just one of many examples of how Nicholson helped his colleagues navigate the thorniest of legal thickets, he said.

Nicholson, 79, died Monday at his Pacific Palisades home after a long illness. He was a founding partner of Cox, Castle & Nicholson, a Century City-based law firm specializing in real estate.  

His clients included Southern California developers Rob Maguire and the late Ray Watt. Nicholson also served on the board of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. and held board positions with both the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate and UCLA’s Center for Real Estate.

Born Dec. 17, 1935, in Ottumwa, Iowa, Nicholson grew up in the South Bay. As a 12-year-old, he suffered a partial amputation of his foot after accepting a dare to climb an oil derrick and then suffering an injury. It took hours for help to arrive, leading a local paper to tell the story with the headline, “The Bravest Little Boy in the World,” recalled Jennifer Nicholson Salke, one of his four daughters.

The injury took the steam out of a budding athletic career, but Salke said her father used the money he received in a settlement after the injury to buy a saxophone -- leading to a high school dance band and a lifelong avocation.

Salke, the president of NBC Entertainment, said she learned valuable lessons from her father that have served her well in her career.

“He was always calm in the center of the storm,” she recalled. “In real estate, there are a lot of big personalities -- just as there are in our business. He always maintained this calm, centered presence -- and I’ve tried to do the same.”

Nicholson earned his law degree at USC and co-founded the firm that bears his name in 1968.

“He was way ahead of his time in his view of what a law firm should be,” said Camara, a partner at the firm. “At the time, the typical law firm was far too hierarchical. The bureaucracy and the pecking order got in the way of client service. He thought lawyers were far too often focused on monetary awards and not client success.”

Nicholson’s solution, Camara said, was to spread management responsibilities around and to give younger lawyers as many duties as they could handle.

The lawyer was so beloved by his colleagues, he added, that the firm’s partners gave him a prized Harley-Davidson motorcycle as a 65th birthday present. “That was something we did out of our hearts, because he did so much for us.”

Nicholson is survived by his wife of 55 years, Joan, and his sister, Lois Nicholson. In addition to Jennifer Salke, Nicholson had three other daughters: Jill Nicholson Samuel, Lauren Nicholson and Amy Nicholson Zimmerman.

Maguire, whose list of developments include the Wells Fargo Center and the Gas Co. Tower in downtown Los Angeles, said Nicholson shares some credit for today’s Los Angeles skyline.

“He was very imaginative and creative, and we were always doing unusual deals,” Maguire said. “He was much more than just a lawyer. We were doing some very big transactions, and he was a full participant.”

VANCOUVER — You see a lot of stories about residential real estate in Vancouver. Less gets written about the commercial market, even though Vancouver-based business lawyers say they’re practising in what could be remembered as the “golden era” for commercial real estate.

Deals involving office buildings, retail locations, high-density condo projects, and industrial lands have been booming for a few decades. Many lawyers peg Vancouver’s Expo 86 as the moment that got the ball rolling. The boom has continued due to the development of the Expo ’86 lands after the event, the construction and expansion of a rapid transit system, the 2010 Winter Olympics, and an influx of investment from China, Japan, Europe, the U.S. and the big Canadian pension funds.

According to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, commercial real estate sales hit a five-year, third-quarter high of 550 transactions for a total $1.9 billion, up from 471 sales for $1.42 billion in the same period of 2014 lawyer for real estate.

The simmering market has made real estate the “must-do” practice for young lawyers interested in practising business law, says Keith Burrell, a partner in the Vancouver office with McCarthy Tétrault LLP, and according to Chambers Canada 2016, one of the best real estate lawyers in both Vancouver and Canada. “In Vancouver real estate attracts good practitioners.”

Those who’ve taken the plunge have had no regrets. Scott Smythe, another McCarthy partner in Vancouver who has been ranked by Chambers, says deciding to practise real estate law was a “no brainer” because there was so much opportunity. “It turned out to be the right thing to do because it happened to coincide with what I’m sure we’re going to look back on as really a golden era in British Columbia in terms of real estate. It’s been a great market for a long time.”

The traditional explanation for Vancouver’s hefty real estate prices is that geography constrains the supply of land. The western edge of the city is bounded by the sea, while it’s hemmed in by mountains in the north and the U.S. border in the south. The city and its suburbs have gradually expanded eastward into the Fraser Valley, but that growth faces limits due to an agricultural land reserve and some transportation bottlenecks.

Some Vancouver lawyers say that old explanation has given way to a new driving force: fresh capital. Institutional investors from Central Canada are now much more familiar with the Vancouver marketplace. International investors also see the potential. Chinese investors last Fall paid $122-million or roughly $600 a square foot to buy a B-class office tower called the United Kingdom Building.

And the international interest goes well beyond mainland China, says Peter Tolensky, aChambers-ranked real estate lawyer

who heads Lawson Lundell LLP’s real estate practice group. U.S. investors are also keen on B.C., particularly because of the exchange rate, he says. “Keep in mind that with the Canadian dollar where it is right now, a lot of people would view B.C. as basically a 20 to 30 per cent discount off the top if they’re coming in with U.S. dollar buying power.”

Population growth and the improved transit infrastructure that came with the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic games are also helping demand, Tolensky says.

“That Olympic boom spurred a lot of transit-related development, with the addition of the Canada Line (rapid transit line) along Cambie Street. That certainly was the first big transit change, and real estate and transit go very well together. So densification along transit lines is certainly a growing trend here,” Tolensky says.

John Sampson of Bull, Housser & Tupper in Vancouver, another ranked real estate practitioner by Chambers Canada, echoes those sentiments. He has seen how the addition of transit links has triggered the development of several mixed use projects along expanded transit corridors in the greater Vancouver area. Visitors to Vancouver who want to see what he means should stop by the massive Marine Gateway project at the corner of Cambie Streets and South West Marine Drive, not far from Vancouver International Airport.

“As far as commercial real estate is concerned, I would say it’s as busy as ever. Vancouver is still a very competitive and a very busy commercial real estate market,” Sampson says.

It’s the big projects that draw Vancouver’s real estate lawyers into the business, such as Ross MacDonald, a partner with Stikeman Elliott LLP in Vancouver.

MacDonald once planned to become a woodworking teacher. A university friend dared him to take the LSAT, and he did well enough to get into law school. Three decades later, Chambers ranks him as one of the top real estate lawyers in Vancouver and he’s the managing partner of Stikeman’s Vancouver office.

As he looks back, he believes the big real estate drive began when lawyers and developers did the deals that carved up the Expo 86 lands. The commercial and legal agreements that developed those lands have over the years been refined and perfected, and have served as the foundation for a generation’s worth of commercial real estate development. He worked on some of those first deals — pioneering work he now describes as “exciting and terrifying at the same time.”

That’s probably why he and his partners prefer working on big long-term development projects, rather than quick transactions, he says. “We like it more. It’s more interesting. It’s longer term. You get to know the people better. You get to understand the business of real estate development. You can’t be an effective real estate development counsel unless you understand real estate development.” 

HechtSolberg has been honored as a Tier 1 San Diego law firm in the areas of real estate law and land use and zoning law in the U.S. News & World Report and Best Lawyers 2016 rankings. The firm was also designated a Tier 2 law firm for San Diego in the area of corporate law.

Firms included in the 2016 “Best Law Firms” list are recognized for professional excellence through consistently impressive ratings from clients and peers. Achieving a tiered ranking signals a unique combination of skill, integrity and qualifications.

To be eligible for a ranking in a particular practice area and metro region, a law firm must have at least one lawyer who is included in Best Lawyers in that particular practice area and metro. Earlier this year, HechtSolberg attorney Paul E. Robinson was named the 2016 San Diego Land Use and Zoning Law “Lawyer of the Year.” Other HechtSolberg attorneys honored on the 2016 Best Lawyersranking are Darryl O. Solberg for Business Organizations, Corporate Law and Real Estate Law and David W. Bagley II for Real Estate Law best real estate law firms.

“We are particularly proud of being ranked among San Diego’s best law firms because this ranking is generated by a rigorous evaluation process based heavily on peer and client reviews,” said Mickey Maher, managing partner at HechtSolberg. “This designation reflects the high level of respect we have earned from our clients and the San Diego legal community during the firm’s more than 40 years of leadership in the real estate and business industry.”

Michael Best’s Real Estate Practice Group is deeply involved in all aspects of the real estate and project development industry in our own markets and on a national level. Our practice focuses on the structuring and development of large, complex private and public-private projects. Michael Best's real estate attorneys are well versed in every segment of the real estate industry, including land use, acquisition/disposition, leasing, financing, partnership structuring, and tax credits.

Mid-Atlantic Bio Angels (MABA), an angel investor group focused on early-stage life science companies, announced that NangioTx, Inc. was voted as “Best in Show” at the first of MABA's 1st Pitch Life Science events of 2016, which took place at the Civic Hall in New York City on February 23, 2016. Partner Stephen M. Goodman is a co-founder of MABA.

"As evidenced by the generally positive comments from the panel, NangioTx co-founder Vivek Kumar concisely articulated the medical issue and the proposed solution, provided enough data to give substance to the company's hypothesis and set out a reasonable path to market, without minimizing potential issues.  A well-deserved win," commented Goodman.

NangioTx is a Houston-based drug development company developing a novel drug promoting growth of new blood vessels in the muscles of patients with peripheral artery disease, which causes muscle atrophy and cell death.

The real estate practices of two law firms with offices in Grand Rapids have been recognized as the “best of the best” in the Midwest region.

Dickinson Wright and Warner Norcross were both included on the list of 37 top-ranking real estate practices by Midwest Real Estate News in the publication’s “2015 Best of the Best” issue.

Entries from more than 60 Midwest commercial real estate law firms were submitted and rankings were calculated based on the total dollar volume of transactions completed in 2014, according to Midwest Real Estate News.

Dickinson Wright

Dickinson Wright earned the No. 2 slot on the list.

Dickinson Wright’s real estate practice is comprised of more than 95 lawyers who are actively involved in diverse real estate matters and regularly represent a wide variety of clients including property owners, developers, managers, contractors, lenders, investors, corporations, nonprofits and governments, among others, in all aspects of real estate.

The firm has offices across Michigan, as well as Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Nevada, Arizona, Washington, D.C., and Toronto, and has experience in real estate transactions in nearly all 50 states and throughout Canada.

“Our outstanding team of real estate attorneys strives to provide our clients with the expertise and unwavering dedication,” said Harlan W. Robins, practice department manager for real estate, environmental, and energy and sustainability. “Our deal volume reflects their hard work, shoulder to shoulder with our clients.”