One thing that immediately stands out about the executive chair and partner of Herrick Feinstein LLP is her warmth.
It would be easier to imagine the executive of a prominent law firm in the real estate legal field to reflect the cut throat nature of the industry. Schwartz is unapologetically upbeat.
“Being nice is not the same thing as not being strong,” Schwartz told amNY Law. “I mean, you can be both.”
With female law firm leaders accounting for about 10 percent of the Am Law 200 ranking of chairs and managing partners, Schwartz’s status as the first female to take the reins at Herrick makes her a bit of a rarity.
Schwartz stepped into her role as the mid-sized firm’s executive chair in 2023 after learning the ropes on its executive committee for several years as she led the firm’s real estate department — one of its principal sectors of law. Herrick occupies a unique space in real estate law — established enough to take on an expansive portfolio of developers and owner operators but small enough to focus on a personalized experience.
“There are very few Herricks left. A lot of us came from big law. A lot of us love this size because we can still know each other,” Schwartz said. “Our culture is important to us. Obviously, so is making money, but it’s the opportunity to… do a lot, but we can do it in a way where we’re very relationship-driven.”
The title of chair can mean different things at different law firms, but for Schwartz it’s a combination of managing large strategic initiatives and day-to-day matters.
“When something finally gets to me… a decision needs to be made that maybe other people don’t feel they have the responsibility to make that decision or don’t have the sort of breadth of understanding and appreciation of the entire gestalt of what’s happening at the firm,” she said.
Over the past two years, Schwartz has guided the firm on a path that maintains its independence. She was proud to report that she had just signed a new lease at the firm’s distinguished 2 Park Avenue office, a classic 1920s art deco building ornamented with latticed brick and terracotta a few blocks away from Grand Central Terminal. The process involved negotiations with a new landlord who’s taking over the building, as well as making some decisions about the firm’s trajectory in the coming years.
Though Schwartz said the firm is always looking to bring on new lateral partners, it’s not making any sudden moves to expand the approximately 130-attorney team.
“We are bombarded with requests to merge by firms that either don’t have a New York office or want to grow their New York office, et cetera,” she said. “And we have decided not to merge and (are) holding the line on that.”
That doesn’t mean she doesn’t have plans to increase the scope of the firm’s work. Schwartz recently brought on a private client group on the firm’s financial side and is very focused on building out the firm’s intellectual property division. But she said that retaining their middle market identity undergirds much of her decision-making.
“We’re very focused on revenue growth but we don’t wanna sacrifice our culture,” Schwartz said.
Schwartz, like many of the Herrick team, came to the firm after getting experience at a large corporate law firm. She left big law to join a captive law firm that had a large real estate portfolio. Around 20 years ago, she was deciding whether to strike out on her own and that’s when she struck a balance coming to Herrick.
Having grown up surrounded by its historic buildings and architecture, she had always been interested in real estate law to be the type of lawyer who could say, “Oh, I worked on that deal.”
She said her path to leadership was more circuitous as a woman. Schwartz, who has two adult sons, one lawyer and one doctor, said that when she was getting into real estate law “you were either on the mommy track or you were on the partnership track. And I think now things have shifted a bit.”
Schwartz’s way of charting a career path that was her own devising seems to fit the mentality of Herrick which she described as “open-minded” and “collaborative.” For Herrick to operate in the middle market space, its lawyers work with clients to find an appropriate budget and introduce them to each other, which distinguishes them from other firms.
Middle market clients tend to cap out how much they’re going to pay their lawyers lower than what big corporate law firms might charge. Herrick is a place where lawyers come who might be interested in reducing their billing rate in order to bring in more business in that market range.
If there is one thing she misses from focusing solely on real estate law, it’s keeping close tabs on her rolodex of clients and connections. The gender dynamics of the industry have been slowly shifting, but Schwartz said that she was happy to take on the challenge of forging that path on her own terms.
“I think particularly in real estate, it’s a bit tough. Real estate is oftentimes a business that’s handed down generationally through the sons,” she said. “It is evolving, but there are still instances where I wouldn’t naturally be a part of the kind of organic way of getting business, whether it’s on the golf course or whether it’s in a private club of some sort.”
Schwartz didn’t shy away from this type of obstacle. “Frankly that’s okay,” she added. “You just have to find your own way.”
Now as executive chair, she’s taken a similar approach to the pressures of leadership.
“I think there are people who thought I was a bit too nice to do a hard job,” she said. “And I hope I’ve proved them wrong.”
