December 17, 2009
THE DAILY JOURNAL
LOS ANGELES – Chicago-based Seyfarth Shaw wooed real estate transactional attorneys Maura B. O’Connor and James S. Cochran from McKenna Long & Aldridge in Los Angeles, creating a West Coast real estate team for the firm. O’Connor, 47, and Cochran, 52, are Seyfarth’s sole real estate attorneys in Southern California and join a 100-attorney Los Angeles office.
The departures leave McKenna Long & Aldridge with no real estate transactional partners in the Los Angeles office, but 20 Los Angeles attorneys remain practicing in real estate. The firm’s largest practices in the 60-attorney office are real estate, government contracts and litigation.
The new hires will help Seyfarth Shaw build up its national real estate niche, said Kenwood Youmans, the Los Angeles managing partner. Most of Seyfarth Shaw’s 120 real estate attorneys are in Atlanta, Chicago, Boston and New York.
“It’s a niche in which we have a platform to play to,” Youmans said. “We have clients we represent in other niches, such as labor and employment, that have operations coast to coast. If their operations are coast to coast, their real estate needs to be coast to coast.”
O’Connor, who specializes in California retail rollouts for companies, said she was attracted to Seyfarth Shaw’s national platform in real estate as well as the ability of Seyfarth Shaw’s Los Angeles office to be a full-service group to her clients. She was with McKenna Long & Aldridge for four years.
“A lot of what I ended up doing was working with companies looking to move into California and help them expedite the process of getting their businesses up and running,” O’Connor said. “It’s not just about real estate, but corporate and business, which Seyfarth has.”
O’Connor also has experience in complex financing transactions and real estate workouts and foreclosures. Cochran’s practice focuses on workouts and restructurings and represents secured lenders, distressed debt investors and special servicers.
William J. Sayers, McKenna Long & Aldridge’s Los Angeles managing partner, said the firm wishes its former partners well.
Sayers said that, despite the pair’s departure, the firm was able to retain O’Connor and Cochran’s “main” clients, which he did not name. “To their credit, the clients are completely satisfied,” Sayers said. “There hasn’t been a mass exodus like you see when people leave.”
O’Connor said some of her clients will remain with her former firm, but others are in the process of following her to Seyfarth Shaw. O’Connor graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School in 1988. She worked at Holland & Knight before moving to Seyfarth Shaw, where she stayed for four years. Most recently, she represented a major retailer entering the California market in closing 150 store leases in 18 months.
Cochran, a 1987 graduate of the University of Texas School of Law, has represented a major international retailer in retail and ground leases worth $250 million.
Lawyer placement firm Watanabe, Nason, Schwartz & Lippman brokered the move.
Seyfarth Shaw, with 725 attorneys, has nine U.S. offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, Atlanta, Houston, Chicago, Boston, New York and Washington, D.C., and an office in Brussels, Belgium.
McKenna Long & Aldridge has 450 attorneys and public-policy advisers in 10 U.S. offices and Brussels. The firm’s largest offices are in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. Additional California offices include San Diego, San Francisco and Sacramento.