Lucia A. Dougherty & Adrienne F. Pardo - Greenberg Traurig LLP

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THE
REAL ESTATE
ISSUE
THE LEGAL MINDS
BEHIND THE DEALS
Greenberg Traurig’s
Adrienne F. Pardo (left)
and Lucia A. Dougherty
COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE
ROUNDTABLE
Reprinted from SouthFloridaCEO | SEPTEMBER 2006

LUCIA A.
DOUGHERTY &
ADRIENNE F.
REAL ESTATE LAWYERS
PARDO
Empresses of the Skyline
Two women are at the center of what lies on Miami’s horizon.
By Suzy Valentine
MATTHEW PACE
Reprinted from SouthFloridaCEO | SEPTEMBER 2006
When we look at
Miami 10 years
from now, we
may have Lucia
A. Dougherty
and Adrienne
F. Pardo to
thank, or chide, for what we see.
The two women are both top land use
attorneys for what is arguably the real
estate industry’s most influential law firm
in Miami-Dade County, Greenberg Traurig
LLP. They have helped clear the way for
some of the area’s most striking deals,
though you may never know it. Shareholders
Dougherty and Pardo, like many of
their legal brethren, are tight-lipped about
their work, which depends heavily on navigating
local government bureaucracies.
“Adrienne and I have been practicing
together for a very long time,” says
Dougherty, who was Miami city attorney
from 1984 to 1988, when Pardo was her
assistant. “When I came here, I recommended
that the firm hire her, and she
came a year later. For a long time we were
the only people doing work in the City of
Miami. We were toiling away in this little
city, all by ourselves, for a very long time.”
During the course of a business relationship
that spans almost 20 years, the two
attorneys have been active participants in
South Florida’s vast real estate development
boom, which is only now ebbing.
“I never worked so hard as last year,”
Dougherty says. “We ran really fast; I felt
that the market was there only for that time.”
In 2005, Greenberg Traurig handled 35
pending applications for major-use special
permits — authorizations that local governments
grant developers for projects such as
condominiums. To put that figure into perspective,
the firm handled a total of 17
applications in the seven years prior. Each
one of those applications can represent nine
months of work for a law partner, plus two
associates and a paralegal.
Dougherty says that their workload is
down 30 percent this year so far, and that
planning and zoning agendas have shrunk
considerably. “Hearings that used to have
15 to 25 projects on them are down to
two,” she shares.
But she insists she and Pardo — and the

REAL ESTATE LAWYERS
entire practice — will remain busy, though
their focus could shift.
“The low-hanging fruit is already taken,”
Dougherty says. “Every piece of property
remaining has something wrong with it.”
And those imperfections — for example,
re-platting land parcels because an alley or
easement complicates a project — are great
fodder for land use lawyers, she adds.
Moreover, developers are eschewing residential
projects, which are increasingly
harder to obtain bank financing for, and
focusing on commercial projects.
Pardo acknowledges this trend and says
she is handling as many as six projects that
have to be reconfigured for office use — a
switch that, if not provisioned for by a developer
from the outset, will require substantial
modification from the City of Miami, Pardo
explains. That process takes three to five
months, possibly adding a project’s cost.
“There’s lots of switching from residential
to [office] condo,” Pardo says. “In some
cases the developer is adding office space; in
others, they are incorporating it. Sometimes
we’re arguing uses in the alternative because
we have to be mindful that the pendulum
could swing back to residential.”
That same kind of uncertainty surrounds
the unveiling, this November, of the first
phase of land use planning revisions for
Miami, known as Miami 21.
“How is it going to affect the projects in
the city?” Pardo asks. “The city is in the
process of drafting a portion of it for the east
quadrant. We don’t have all of the answers
yet as to how it will affect the properties, so
there’s uncertainty in not having the whole
puzzle to review with all the regulations in
order to put it all together.”
SMOOTH OPERATORS
Pardo and Dougherty have developed a
reputation in Miami as the go-to attorneys
for difficult work, particularly when it comes
to controversial projects.
Oscar A. Rodriguez, vice president of
development for Miami-based The Related
Group Inc., and a frequent client of Greenberg
Traurig, waxes on about Dougherty:
“I've never met a more professional or
knowledgeable attorney, but she’s also
charismatic, which helps when dealing
with the neighborhood associations.”
From her Brickell Avenue office, near
downtown Miami, Dougherty is neither
self-effacing nor boastful about her reputation.
She says that when seeking permitting
approval from the City of Miami, it
sometimes doesn’t hurt to call on a higher
power. At least, that’s how she saw
celebrity architect Cesar Pelli’s approach
to the process when he appeared before the
commission on a matter concerning the
Carnival Center for the Performing Arts,
which is scheduled to open next month.
More supplicant than applicant,
Dougherty recalls, Pelli approached the
dais as though it were an altar and City
Hall a church.
“He did something in a hearing I thought
I’d use one day,” Dougherty says. “He is a
very tall, elegant man with white hair and he
gets down and genuflects, and he’s talking to
these guys on his knees. I thought: ‘This is
unbelievable. I’m going to have to try this
sometime.’What you won’t do for a vote.”
Pelli’s tactic worked, as did efforts by
Greenberg Traurig — Dougherty and Pardo
joined forces on the application — to tie up
some of the parcels required to accommodate
Pelli’s portion of the project.
“We worked with Knight Ridder,
amassing all the property around and all
those parking lots,” Dougherty says. “We
did it by creating different corporations
and each corporation went to the separate
landlords, and nobody knew the plan. We
had different lawyers, too.”
The help that the Greenberg Traurig
lawyers gave to the project, pro bono, didn’t
go unnoticed.
“The board of trustees passed a resolution
thanking Lucia and Adrienne for their contributions,”
says Carnival Center trust chairman
Parker Thomson, managing partner of
the Miami office of law firm Hogan & Hartson
LLP. “They are among the most talented
in that field and they helped to work through
the myriad problems.”
THE LOOK AHEAD
While neither attorney denies there’s a
slowdown in residential real estate development,
Pardo says many developers are in a
wait-and-see mode, continuing to go through
the motions even if they are not beginning
construction on projects.
“They are getting their approvals,” she
claims. “They’re not necessarily getting their
working drawings done and hitting the
ground, but they’re waiting to see how the
market will affect them. The zoning
approvals are still good but we just have to
make sure [they] don’t expire and get an
extension when we can.”
That is, if a project can even get off the
ground. “It used to be that the big challenge
was to get the zoning in place,” Dougherty
says. “Now the challenges developers are
facing are financing and constructing. Insurance
costs have gone up and the cost of construction
has gone up. Sub-contractor costs
are off the roof, if you can even find them.”
Even when projects are scuttled, the
repercussions can keep attorneys busy for
many months after the fact, Dougherty
adds. Take BAP Development Inc.’s illfated
Onyx 2 condo project, which handed
pre-construction buyers “back all the contracts,”
Dougherty says. “But I don’t know
if anybody is suing them. That’s what has
happened to several developers in South
Florida. They’ve sold the building and they
have contracts with buyers. They cannot
build the building, even if every buyer
closed.”
Without disclosing details, Pardo says
she assisted another development company
that will have to disappoint purchasers.
“I had a project recently where I believe
the developer had to return monies,” she
says. “The developer was inexperienced, so
it was difficult to get the financing from the
banks” to complete the project.
The firm handles cases on the other side
of the sales transaction as well. In one case
Dougherty is familiar with, though it was
not handled by Greenberg Traurig’s Miami
office, an individual who had only a reservation
agreement to purchase a condo unit
sued a developer and lost.
“That’s specifically what the reservation
agreement says,” Dougherty explains. “That
we can get out of it. We haven’t had one yet
and there have been no reported cases,
though several are pending, of people who
have been given their money back in a contract
situation.”
What is clear, say Pardo and Dougherty,
is that attorneys will continue to face a fair
amount of work in the near future as the real
estate boom settles down.
Case in point: Buyers are now asking the
courts for more than their deposits back.
Some are claiming the so-called “benefit of
the bargain” — the amount a buyer would
have profited from the increase in value of
the property had it actually been built.
How the courts will handle these challenges
remains to be seen.
MATTHEW PACE
Reprinted from SouthFloridaCEO | SEPTEMBER 2006