Locke Lord's Los Angeles office is a full-service office focusing on commercial and complex litigation, general commercial transactions, corporate representation, real estate and insurance regulatory matters.
Litigation
Our Los Angeles team includes experienced lawyers litigating in individual and class action cases across diverse practice areas, including commercial disputes, employment/wage and hour, environmental, insurance and reinsurance disputes and coverage analysis, intellectual property, product liability, toxic torts and unfair business competition. The Los Angeles office has significant experience representing financial services, insurance, industrial and local government clients in litigation, transactional and regulatory matters. Our representative experience includes:
Corporate & Transactional
On transactional matters, Locke Lord's attorneys in Los Angeles regularly lead merger and acquisition transactions, joint venture and financing transactions for clients in wide range of industries, including insurance, financial services, health care, software, manufacturing and retail. Los Angeles lawyers also regularly work with Locke Lord's private equity and other clients as key members of deal teams for major mergers, acquisitions and similar transactions that leverage the Firm's nation-wide platform. In the insurance space, the Los Angeles team includes two high-level former California Chief Deputy Insurance Commissioners, who have unmatched experience working with insurance regulators on behalf of insurance and reinsurance clients nationwide, including on mergers and acquisitions. The team in Los Angeles also assists clients in the early stages of their business, advising entrepreneurs in connection with organizational and capital raising activities and both emerging businesses and venture capital firms in debt, equity and hybrid financing transactions, including private placements of securities. Los Angeles attorneys also handle technology and intellectual property matters involving patent, software and technology licenses, development agreements, outsourcing arrangements and similar agreements.
Real Estate
The principal real estate practice area of the Firm’s Los Angeles office involves the representation of commercial banks, insurance companies and other institutional lenders, private investors, local and regional developers and equity capital providers — including private equity firms — engaging in real estate transactions in California and throughout the Pacific Northwest and Southwest. The acquisition, sale and financing transactions include properties as diverse as industrial facilities, office buildings, multifamily housing, residential tract developments, retail centers and hotels, including substantial experience representing construction lenders and borrowers in projects involving mezzanine debt and forward loan commitments as well as construction, bridge and permanent financing.
Maintaining a mortgage financing practice requires understanding of and experience in creditor’s rights, and the Firm’s Los Angeles real estate lawyers have substantial experience representing lenders and investors in the restructuring, workout and foreclosure of troubled real estate investments, including properties in bankruptcy. The COVID-19 pandemic provided plentiful opportunities for the team to apply such restructuring and workout experience in the representation of landlords and tenants adversely affected by various state and local stay-at-home orders.
In addition to their finance practice, Los Angeles real estate lawyers regularly represent investors, developers and other commercial users in a wide variety of real estate transactions, including the acquisition and disposition of real estate assets, leasing, land use and condemnation issues, with many transactions involving sustainable development and property contaminated by hazardous materials.
Giving Back
Our lawyers play a vital role in the community in which they live and work, including participation in local nonprofit and civic boards, working with community-based programs and supporting education, health and welfare, arts, children's and faith-based organizations. Members of our Los Angeles team sit on the boards of Public Counsel, the Mexican American Bar Foundation, Women Lawyers of Los Angeles Racial Justice and Equality Advisory Council and the Just the Beginning Summer Legal Institute steering committee. The Firm’s national commitment to pro bono legal services is evidenced by the decades-long commitment of its Los Angeles real estate lawyers to the pro bono representation of tenant associations and community based nonprofits in the development and preservation of affordable housing projects. Since 2004, the Los Angeles office has participated in Verbum Dei High School’s Corporate Work Study Program, which sends two students to work once a week plus one day per month in return for a portion of their tuition to be covered by the Firm.
The Managing Partner of the Los Angeles office is Nina Huerta.
Click below to read:
Chambers USA Recognizes 57 Locke Lord Lawyers and 18 Practice Areas