Holland & Knight Partner Stuart Saft didn’t grow up thinking about becoming a lawyer — he didn’t have a plan for his future at all.
But with 50 years as a pioneering real estate attorney, he’s not only built a career, but he’s also building a legacy of teaching and mentoring generations of lawyers — while reminding them that there’s life outside the office.
Saft grew up the son of working-class parents in Brooklyn and Queens and went to Hofstra University.
“In addition to meeting my wife, Stephanie, Hofstra changed my life. I got involved in everything from planning events, creating a student senate, attending meetings with the administrators, arranging for big-name entertainment, writing for the school newspaper, and keeping the school open during the Vietnam protest riots by inviting experts to discuss the war and the Domino Theory,” he said. “It was fabulous — the things I learned at Hofstra are the basis of what I do every day, which is why I say that ‘It all started at Hofstra.’”
Saft had attended college with the help of Army Reserve Officers Training Corp, and his required military service loomed after graduation, during the height of the Vietnam War. Stephanie suggested he go to law school and enter the Army afterward.
“No one in my family had gone to college, let alone law school,” he said. But he listened.
Saft took the LSAT, sitting with students whose parents were lawyers and had planned on being lawyers from childhood. (“I was too naive to be nervous about the LSAT,” he said.) He never imagined that he’d place in the 98th percentile.
After graduating from Columbia Law School, Saft entered the Army, serving in Newport News, Va. On leaving the Army as a captain, most of his classmates were already well into their careers, while he was just starting. He started at a small Wall Street firm where he focused on corporate and securities law.
“In those days, no one was thanking us for our military service. At that time, Wall Street firms did not do real estate transactions,” he said. After four years, a client asked him to represent them in making a second mortgage loan secured by a shopping center.
“I did not have a mentor but used my corporate skills to prepare and close the loan,” he continued. “I must have handled it correctly because the client kept sending me real estate transactions.”
Arriving early to one closing, Saft, representing the lender, sat with the borrower, a former Yale tax professor who was inventing the real estate tax shelter, and his experienced lawyer.
The borrower asked his attorney a question — and received an answer that sent Saft reeling.
“If the lawyer’s answer was right, everything I’d done as a real estate lawyer was wrong. So, I questioned him and he brushed me off,” Saft related.
The former professor, however, wanted to know why Saft disagreed. After he explained his position, the professor agreed with Saft and asked his lawyer for his reasoning. “To this day, the lawyer gave the stupidest answer I’ve ever heard — he responded that he didn’t look at the documents until he put the closing report together.”
The next day the professor hired Saft to handle complex acquisitions, financings and leasing and structuring the tax aspects. Eventually, word got around that Saft was a young real estate attorney who understood tax law. Saft worked on over 150 tax shelter transactions until the laws changed, and all of his deals held up on audit.
Because so little was written about complex real estate transactions, Saft started writing about them, eventually publishing 100 articles about real estate, tax, economics and finance. Writing books was an accident. He was approached by a publisher to write a book about tax shelters, but Saft demurred and convinced the publisher that what was needed was a book explaining real estate transactions with forms and analysis.
As a result, Saft wrote “Commercial Real Estate Forms,” which started at three volumes, grew to 11, and which he has updated and supplemented for 37 years. He then wrote and supplemented “Commercial Real Estate Transactions,” “Commercial Real Estate Leasing,” “Commercial Real Estate Workouts,” “Real Estate Investors Survivors Guide” and “Real Estate Development: Strategy for Changing Markets.” Since 2019, he has also been writing Client Alerts about the unintended consequences of legislation and regulations affecting real estate.
He represented Aetna and Chase in construction and permanent financing and then in a recession, his practice turned to workouts and bankruptcy. He then represented Tony Goldman, a visionary, in Goldman’s work reinventing Soho with loft conversions.
“One day Tony walked into my office to negotiate a ground lease, and we started to talk about reusing older buildings,” Saft said. “In a sense, he taught me what has become ‘adaptive reuse,’ and I started doing the offering plans.”
A stint serving as president of his own co-op board led Saft to the board of the Council of New York Cooperatives and Condominiums. He then worked with then-Congressman Chuck Shumer assisting low and moderate-income co-ops in Brooklyn, and with Queens Borough President Claire Shulman and Manhattan Borough President Virginia Fields saving affordable co-ops from foreclosure. This led to his friendship with Chuck Synder, the president of the National Co-Op Bank (NCB). Saft served on NCB’s board of directors for 12 years including three years as a chairman. He did the debt restructuring of Co-Op City, and the rebuilding of 12,000 apartments in Parkchester.
When another recession hit, Saft started working with developers. He was the proponent of the Chapter 11 plan to get Cityspire out of bankruptcy and completed its construction including crawling around the roof of the building seeking the source of a whistle that was heard around the city. He completed the workout and completion of Worldwide Plaza, including climbing onto the parapets on the 45th floor seeking the cause of spalling bricks.
“I wound up representing the developers because I understood their business and was committed to writing plans that facilitated the sale and the operation of the building and found I loved the development side because it unleashed my creativity,” he said.
He became a partner in his first law firm after five years and left two years later to launch his own firm with two colleagues, which eventually grew to 25 lawyers. After another recession, he built a real estate practice within a larger firm. A need for a larger platform led him to LeBouef Lamb, which then merged with Dewey Ballantine. Ultimately, Saft became Dewey & LeBouef’s global head of real estate.
At home, his civic work continued, including serving as president of the NYC Private Industry Council (formed under the federal Job Training Partnership Act) and then working with the federal government to establish the Workforce Investment Act. He formulated New York’s Workforce Investment strategy and chaired NYC’s WIB Board for 12 years under Mayors Guiliani and Bloomberg.
The day after 9/11, he held a meeting in his midtown office with city, state and federal workforce officials to plan for the anticipated job losses from the terrorist attack. A week later, Mayor Guiliani sent him to DC to meet with New York’s Congressional delegation. After a three-hour meeting with Senator Hillary Clinton, she and Senator Schumer were able to obtain a $20 billion commitment from President Bush to rebuild New York City. Saft received commendations from the National Association of Workforce Boards and Mayor Bloomberg for his work.
While building his practice, Saft honed the training philosophy and program he uses today — one in which his door is always open, questions are welcomed and young attorneys’ work/life balance is supported. Much of it was based on his own personal experience, from the lack of support his banker wife experienced when their sons were young. He brought that philosophy to Holland & Knight in 2012. In 13 years, he helped build Holland & Knight’s New York City real estate practice from five lawyers to 60, working on $11 billion in transactions in 2024.
Saft is determined to bring creativity and mentorship to new generations of real estate lawyers and personally trains young associates, considering it to be the most important work he does. “We have a collaborative practice.”
Also a differentiator is how Saft’s practice focuses on work/life balance for its relatively young team — except for Saft, nearly everyone is under 50 years old. Approximately half of the attorneys are women, and Saft ensures that new parents don’t lose their work while on maternity or paternity leave. The rest of the team divides the work until their colleague returns, and the returning attorney gets back their entire portfolio of work.
“I learned with my own children that they are young for only a brief period of time so if you miss it, there is not another chance,” Saft continued. “There will always be another deal. I want the parents to spend time with their kids, attend their games and meet their teachers.”
Saft arrives at the office at 6:30 a.m., leaves at 6:30 p.m. and has no intention of retiring, ever. One other note: no one has ever heard Saft scream at anyone, ever, although there is a lot of laughter coming from the 30th floor of 787 Seventh Ave.
There’s a picture of one more child in Saft’s office — one of himself as a 10-year-old Cub Scout.
“I keep this picture of myself to remind me who I really am,” he said. “If you are successful, you can easily forget who you are. Young Stuie keeps me grounded so I never forget who I am and whence I came. I may be older, but I will always be that kid from Brooklyn and Queens who went to Hofstra.”
