• Transactions and Finance
• Land Use and Zoning

Additionally, the Guide recognized Chicago Real Estate shareholders Corey Light (Transactions and Finance) and Mark McCombs (Land Use and Zoning).

The Legal 500 US - Volume IV: Real Estate, Labor and Employment, and Tax is the fourth of four guides covering the U.S. legal market. The guide provides independent and unbiased commentary on pre-eminent law firms, and lawyers, in the world’s strongest and most competitive legal market.

About Greenberg Traurig, LLP

Greenberg Traurig, LLP is an international, full-service law firm with more than 1,700 attorneys and governmental affairs professionals in the U.S., Europe and Asia. The firm is ranked seventh on The American Lawyer's Am Law 100 listing of the largest law firms in the U.S., based on number of lawyers.

Greenberg Traurig serves clients from offices in: Albany, NY; Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Atlanta, GA; Boca Raton, FL; Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; Dallas, TX; Denver, CO; Fort Lauderdale, FL; Houston, TX; Las Vegas, NV; Los Angeles, CA; Miami, FL; Morristown, NJ; New York, NY; Orange County, CA; Orlando, FL; Philadelphia, PA; Phoenix, AZ; Sacramento, CA; Silicon Valley, CA; Tallahassee, FL; Tampa Bay, FL; Tokyo, Japan; Tysons Corner, VA; Washington, D.C.; West Palm Beach, FL; Wilmington, DE; and Zurich, Switzerland. Additionally, the firm has strategic alliances with the following independent law firms: Olswang, London and Brussels; Studio Santa Maria, Milan and Rome; and Hayabusa Asuka Law Offices in Tokyo.

For additional information, please visit the firm's Web site at www.gtlaw.com.

The law firm signed a letter of intent to move by early 2010 and the building will be renamed K & L Gates Center because the firm will become its largest tenant. The building will also remove the Ariba signs and replace them with K & L Gates signs as part of the transition.

Ariba, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., extended its lease at the building to 2017 earlier this year, but it also cut the amount of space it will use from 10 to five floors.

Kirkpatrick & Lockhart will occupy 13 floors of the building.

The law firm has 235 lawyers and 650 employees in the city, and maintains 21 other offices in the United States, Europe and Asia.

New York law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges plans to open an office in Hong Kong in October to serve its private equity and corporate clients.

The office, which was approved by the Hong Kong authorities in August, will have five attorneys: two New York partners, Akiko Mikumo and Peter Feist; a Shanghai partner, David Meredith; and two associates. The group will focus on private equity and project finance, Feist said.

The 1,200-attorney Weil firm, whose private equity clients with Chinese operations include Bain Capital and Providence Equity Partners, is the last of the five largest New York firms to open in Hong Kong.

"In order to get the most out of our Asia practice, we had to be in Hong Kong," said Mikumo, who is a member of the firm's management committee and will be managing partner of the new office. "Once you're in Shanghai, you need to be in the key financial centers."

The firm, which opened its Shanghai office three years ago, intends to use Hong Kong as its base for representing clients in Asia. Weil has plans to open an office in Beijing next and is in the process of applying for a license. Tokyo "would be a natural next step," Mikumo said.

Feist said: "There are so many foreign investors asking about doing business in mainland China and how to deal with the regulatory environment. The whole modus operandi is so different from how U.S. businesses are run."

Though the U.S. subprime crisis has virtually halted private equity activity in the United States, Feist said he was not worried about the firm's prospects in Hong Kong.

"I don't expect the private equity firms to stop looking at the opportunities in Asia," said Feist, who moved to Hong Kong on Monday.

The firm's clients did not ask the firm to open an office in Hong Kong, though "private equity clients had voiced their concern," Mikumo said.

The Hong Kong office will look to hire additional lawyers, including intellectual property and general corporate practitioners, after the opening, she said.

"We're going to start modestly," Mikumo said. "It's easy to hire laterals if you have an office there. The firm wanted people from the home office to start operations."

Weil, whose clients include General Electric, Reuters, Johnson & Johnson and Koch Industries, had revenue of $1.05 billion in 2006, the ninth-highest among U.S. law firms, according to the trade publication American Lawyer.

Weil was fourth among legal advisers to principals in mergers and acquisitions deals involving private equity in 2007, according to Bloomberg data. The firm provided advice on 48 deals worth a total of $129.7 billion. Sullivan & Cromwell is first with $205.7 billion in private equity deals.

http://www.weil.com

Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice has been named as one of the Best Law Firms for Women by Working Mother magazine and Flex Time Lawyers LLC. Best Law Firms for Women honored 50 firms for their commitment to the retention and advancement of female talent.

Working Mother and Flex-Time Lawyers selected law firms based on survey data collected earlier this year measuring a variety of factors, including the number of women in leadership positions, parental leave, child care, flexibility options and programs to help train, retain and advance women.

Womble Carlyle will be profiled in the August/September issue of Working Mother magazine. Flex-Time Lawyers is a consulting firm that advises law firms on work/life balance.

http://www.wcsr.com

The Bakersfield offices of Sacramento-based law firm Kronick, Moskovitz, Tiedemann & Girard are negotiating to add attorneys to its team of five, company executives said Monday.

The firm, which provides legal counsel to a variety of public and private entities in Kern, would not identify the attorneys or firms it hopes to acquire.

A merger with an existing small firm is a possibility, said Chairman Bruce Scheidt.

"The firm's plan is to grow at a controlled rate to meet the needs of our clients," said Brett Price, managing attorney in Bakersfield.

Clients include the Kern County Water Agency, the city of Bakersfield and Kern County.

The firm runs a broad practice, including water law, tax law, real estate development and land use law.

The company also works with public agencies and education districts.

The Bakersfield offices opened in 2000 to serve a growing clientele in the Central Valley, a company news release said.

Much of the firm's increased business stems from the public agency, real estate development and land use portions of the practices, Price said.

"The outlook for Bakersfield is for, hopefully, ongoing growth -- particularly in the commercial real estate area," he said.

The company also opened a San Luis Obispo office on Aug. 1 to work cooperatively with the Bakersfield attorneys.

"We find that a lot of the clients we have -- as well as prospective clients -- have interests both in the San Joaquin Valley and on the Central Coast," Price said.

http://www.kmtg.com