When attorney Carol Sigmond and a friend visited the then-new Yankee Stadium more than a decade ago, she saw that something wasn’t right. After decades of specializing in construction law, she realizes that a potential problem was looming.
“I noticed that they didn’t have an expansion joint in one place,” she recalled.
Without that buffer, the results would be cracks in the concrete from heat, cold and moisture (freezethaw). Sigmond didn’t represent anyone involved in the project, but she kept a close eye on the property. Sure enough, cracks developed, and the Yankees and eventually the city began investigating the cause.
“Eventually, I talked to someone in the District Attorney’s office,” she said, quite possibly helping to avert a criminal prosecution over what was a basic mistake.
It’s that kind of expertise that she and her colleagues Joshua Deal, partner, and Christopher T. Luehs, associate, are now bringing to law firm Nossaman LLP, becoming their own construction-focused sub-specialty within the larger Infrastructure Group, in January of this year. The team handles construction and real estate industry-related matters including construction defect litigation, arbitration, appeals, bid protests, contract preparation, mediation, litigation, receivership and suretyship and litigates construction disputes for public works and private buildings.
More than four decades into her legal career, Sigmond focuses her practice on construction and real estate matters, including arbitration, appeals, bid protests, contract preparation, mediation, litigation, receivership and suretyship. She represents clients in construction litigation relating to issues that arise when adjacent owners develop their properties, as well as expediting a builder’s construction project by ensuring that the proper contracts are in place.
She also is an experienced mediator and arbitrator handling construction and real estate cases for the New York County Supreme Court Commercial Division Roster of Volunteer Mediators and the American Arbitration Association’s Roster of Construction Industry Arbitrators.
An experienced litigator in state and federal courts in New York and New Jersey, Deal represents owners, developers, general contractors, subcontractors and suppliers in litigation and transactional matters relating to construction. He represents construction industry clients on contract disputes, construction defect claims, delay claims, payment and performance bond claims, mechanic’s lien claims and adjacent property damage claims.
“Carol and Joshua are best-in-class litigators with extensive experience in the construction litigation field and deep relationships in the New York market and nationally,” said Elizabeth Cousins, chair of Nossaman’s Infrastructure Group, in the announcement. “Their practice builds on the strength of the litigation arm of our Infrastructure Group further enhancing our ability to advise clientsthrough all aspects of the construction project lifecycle, while adding a robust presence in New York.”
Law wasn’t part of Sigmond’s original plan as an undergraduate at Grinnell College in the 1970s.
“I actually started out planning to be a demographer and was thinking about applying to Princeton to go to grad school,” she recalled. “But I had an adviser who said, ‘You’re going to law school. You’re the only one I’m advising who’s going to like it and do well.’”
He was right, even though there were relatively few women pursuing law back then. After earning her juris doctor degree from Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law in 1975, she joined a small firm but quickly found her specialty.
“I successfully worked on a case involving an accident at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority in Washington, D.C.,” she said. “That brought me to their attention at a time when they were under pressure to hire women. I started with accident work then shifted to government contract work.”
Aiding in that shift was a relatively rare ability — without any formal training, Sigmond can understand drawings and visualize those two-dimensional images in three dimensions. Among her cases there was a design flaw regarding, yes, a missing expansion joint on a D.C. metro station.
A move to New York in the 1990s provided even more opportunity, with older buildings packed even more closely together.
“D.C. was a government city, New York was a private party city,” she explained. A particular specialty became the effects that construction work on one building would have on those adjacent.
After working with several firms in the city over the years, she became a partner at Greenspoon Marder, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-founded national firm with 20 offices around the country, but with a real estate practice based more on transactions than construction.
“Greenspoon’s emphasis is on cannabis, hospitality and entertainment, less on the nuts and bolts of construction,” she said. “I was concerned that we were too isolated at Greenspoon. We were the only people doing that kind of work.”
Nossaman’s Infrastructure Group, meanwhile, has handled the nation’s first multi-modal design-build project, developed the nation’s first availability payment contract and the world’s first fully automated toll road using electronic transponders to collect tolls. It also negotiated the first toll concession agreement in Texas history, the first procurement under California’s P3 (public-private partnership) law and is currently helping Colorado revolutionize safety enforcement on its express lanes network. Nossaman’s expertise and reach, and Sigmond’s focuses were complementary.
“Nossaman has a very successful model on the West Coast, and in Washington, D.C. and Texas,” Sigmond observed. “They represent a lot of government agencies and P3, while we operate much more in the private sector. We bring different dimensions. At the same time, I see real opportunity to structure Nossaman in New York to do the same things, such as advising government agencies and working on vertical P3 projects.”
Infrastructure Group members, including Partner Youju Min, have extensive local and global experience planning, procuring and financing and litigating claims on award-winning transportation, public building, water and wastewater projects.
“Now, we are part of the Infrastructure Group, part of the claims side and the litigation side,” Sigmond explained, adding that while building codes may vary by state, dirt, brick, mortar and steel are pretty much the same everywhere. “We’re part of the bigger group and the claims subgroup, so we have marketing and discovery people in house, people who know how to look at drawings in house. We went from three people to 60.”
Nossaman also benefits from Sigmond’s profile and work outside the office. A frequent author and speaker on topics such as contractor obligations, the challengers of construction in a dense city and, more recently, tariffs, Sigmond also is active in philanthropy, sitting on the Lawyers’ Advisory Council.
She is a past president of the New York County Lawyers Association and former Vice President of the New York State Bar Association (First Judicial District), serving on its Executive Committee and House of Delegates and participating in committees including the President’s Committee on Access to Justice.
And word about her expertise have gotten around even outside the legal community.
“The most interesting part of my life is the calls I get from regular people,” she said. “Apparently, there is some kind of community information system in Brooklyn and people call all the time about homeowners working on some property attached to their own.”
That has led her to think about the structure of the New York City Department of Buildings, and how it could be changed to better serve communities and keep construction teams safer.
“The span for the Building Commissioner is too broad,” she said. “It covers zoning, worker safety and building safety. Should we separate zoning completely, and isolate it from the building? Should worker safety be isolated from building safety? I don’t think the reorganizations fit together well structurally.”
City planning mostly revolves around paper and codes, she said, while building safety focuses on structural engineers, architects and properly trained inspectors. Meanwhile, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is engaged solely in worker safety.
“Based on my engagement with community, we don’t pay enough attention to building safety,” she stated. “Think of all the roads, the rights of way for utilities, tunnels including railroad tunnels. There’s a lot going on, all of which has to be looked at and looked at differently. There are some 30,000 buildings in Brooklyn and Manhattan that are cracked.
“And who’s paying the price? Everybody through their property insurance.”
And yet another area to pursue is artificial intelligence (AI).
“Artificial intelligence is moving rapidly, and adapting to AI in the practice of law is a fun challenge,” she said.
Lupa Technology out of Serbia has created data management solutions that will consolidate all the data in a project and turn it into concise reports that will “change construction,” she said.
Just three months into the new firm, Sigmond, Deal and Luehs have yet to meet many of their colleagues from other offices face-to-face but have been in regular contact via Zoom and Teams.
“We’re forming teams from different projects,” she said. “We’re already interacting with other members at Nossaman and will meet many of them in person at our May retreat.”
