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Put my experience to work for you

Before establishing my law practice in 1999, I worked in non-profit management and government. I was the Director of Management and Technical Assistance for United Neighborhood Houses of New York and I served under Mayors Koch and Dinkins in the New York City Mayor's Office of Operations. I am an alumna of Barnard College, and received a Master of Public Administration degree from Columbia University. I graduated with a Juris Doctor degree from Vanderbilt University School of Law, where I won the Junius Allison Legal Aid Award for service to the Vanderbilt Legal Aid Society. For three years, I served on the Association of the Bar of the City of New York's Social Welfare Law Committee. I am admitted to the practice of law in New York and New Jersey.

I have always been interested in real estate. I grew up on post-war Long Island where I saw farmland become office complexes and housing developments. Even as a child, I knew these things did not happen spontaneously. At 17 years old, I came to New York City to start college and live in one of the most dynamic real estate markets in the world. It was 1982 and the subway cars were covered in graffiti, the City was not as safe is it is today, and rental apartment buildings were converting to condominiums and cooperatives. My senior thesis in college was a study of zoning and suburban development. In graduate school, I continued my work in urban planning. One project involved documenting all of 23rd Street in Manhattan from river to river and looking at trends in real estate transactions in Midtown South. For my final graduate project, I was the director of a study of the economic development of Hudson County, New Jersey, which we conducted for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for its use in planning PATH and other transportation services.

The stock market and the real estate market both crashed soon after I graduated in 1987. So I took my urban planning skills to work with New York City Department of Transportation in its private bus operator program. After a year, I landed my dream job in the Mayor's Office of Operations where we functioned like management consultants to the various City agencies. After three years and a change in mayors, a scholarship tempted me to law school and a new city.

While law school was a great education, being a Northerner living in Nashville was a greater education. I soon discovered that there were much more diverse opinions about history (particularly "That Recent Unpleasantness"), food (there were no kosher or vegetarian lunch options at law school orientation), and language (was it my accent or theirs?). My law school note was on ethics and government service delivery, specifically making subway service accessible to people with disabilities. My first job after law school was related to this; for a year I was a Contract Manager for the New York City Transit Authority's Paratransit Program.

After my year with one of the first employee MetroCards, I became a training manager at United Neighborhood Houses of New York (UNH), and within six months became its Director of Management and Technical Assistance. UNH and its members are a living part of New York City history (think Henry Street Settlement and Jacob Riis) and today the settlement houses still provide vital services to needy New Yorkers. After three and a half years, I decided to leave UNH to work in real estate and develop my own law practice.

When I started in real estate, I worked as both a broker and attorney. Eventually, my law practice grew to where I could concentrate on it alone. Over 20 years later, I can still say I enjoy real estate. I enjoy my clients, the properties, and seeing the City and the metro area grow and change.

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