Jonathan Mechanic
Partner & Chairman, Real Estate Department
Fried Frank

Jonathan L. Mechanic is chairman of Fried Frank’s Real Estate Department. He first joined the Firm in 1978. He became a partner in 1987, when he rejoined the Firm after having acted for five years as general counsel and a managing director of HRO International Ltd., a real estate development organization responsible for the development of more than 2.5 million square feet of office space in Manhattan.

Mr. Mechanic routinely counsels developers, owners, investors, REITs, and lenders in all aspects of commercial real estate transactions. Notably, he represented JP Morgan in connection with its redevelopment of 270 Park Avenue into a new 2.5-million-square-foot headquarters building, Maefield Development in its approximately US$1.6 billion acquisition of 20 Times Square (aka 701 Seventh Avenue), and CWCapital Asset Management in its sale of Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village to Blackstone Group and Ivanhoé Cambridge. He also represents landlords and tenants in commercial leasing and ground lease transactions, including his recent representations of 21st Century Fox and News Corp. on their headquarters leases at 1211 Avenue of Americas; Citigroup in its long-term lease of its global headquarters at 388-390 Greenwich Street and the exercise of its option to purchase the building; Coach in the sale-leaseback of its global headquarters at 10 Hudson Yards; Ernst & Young in its more than 600,000-square-foot lease for its new headquarters at One Manhattan West; Shiseido in its 225,000-square foot lease at 390 Madison Avenue for its US headquarters; and JP Morgan in its 437,000-square-foot-lease at 390 Madison Avenue.

Mr. Mechanic has taught the real estate transactions course at Harvard Law School for more than ten years. He also lectures regularly for NYU Law School, the Real Estate Board of New York and the Practising Law Institute, and is a co-author of The Commercial Office Lease Handbook published by the American Bar Association.