Proskauer has bolstered its real estate capital markets practice by attracting a partner with nearly two and a half decades’ experience in the corporate finance and REITs space.
Michael Choate comes to Proskauer as a partner from the small Chicago firm of Shefsky & Froelich. Choate provides counsel to REITs in transactions such as equity and debt offerings, tender offers, M&A, and compliance matters. He has done a series of deals for Inland Real Estate Investment Corporation, stretching back to 1998, and has represented REITs sponsored by Behringer Harvard Holdings since 2005. Joining Choate in his move to Proskauer is former Shefsky & Froelich shareholder Kevin Lippert, who comes aboard as a senior counsel in Chicago.
Choate’s decision to move to Proskauer grew partly out of his acquaintance with Peter Fass, a current co-head of the firm’s real estate capital markets group based in New York.
“I’ve known Peter Fass, who is really a presence in the industry, since I was a first-year associate. I’ve always respected him, we’ve worked side by side, and we’ve been on committees together. He contacted me in the early summer and we had a discussion about whether I would be interested in joining the REIT capital markets practice at Proskauer,” Choate said.
Choate's move stands in contrast to a trend of lawyers migrating from Chicago mega-firms to smaller and mid-sized firms in the city, as the expansion of the modest-sized firms fills a void left by legal industry mergers in the early 2000s. The type of model represented by firms such as Freeborn & Peters may exert a powerful lure for some attorneys, but other trends are at work.
“For a long time, firms of a smaller size could compete in the real estate capital markets area. Over the last decade or so, I just found it to be more and more difficult. I started to see a trend of clients preferring big full-service international firms,” Choate commented.