Biglaw

Lawyerly Lairs: Biglaw Name Partner Lists Longtime Home -- For $4 Million

He's moving on up -- to a nearby $8 million apartment.

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The elegant exterior of 850 Park Avenue — please ignore the annoying traffic barricades (via Google Street View).

Associates at Schulte Roth & Zabel who bill big hours fare well. Partners at the Am Law 100 firm, known for its expertise in hedge funds, do even better.

And William Zabel, founding and name partner at SRZ, presumably does the best of all. So it should come as no surprise that he and his wife live in a luxurious, multimillion-dollar Manhattan co-op — which they just put on the market, for a shade over $4 million.

Here’s the news, as reported by The Real Deal:

Bow-tied super lawyer William Zabel is looking to upsize.

The attorney who was behind the massive Bernie Madoff settlement is leaving the Park Avenue apartment where he has lived with his wife for 38 years. The 850 Park Avenue unit is listed for $4.2 million.

If you’ll allow me to quibble, it would be more precise to describe Bill Zabel as the lawyer behind the Jeffry Picower settlement. There were many, many settlements of Madoff-related matters, which have kept Madoff trustee Irving Picard and his BakerHostetler colleagues busy for several years. Zabel’s client, Jeffry Picower, happened to be the biggest beneficiary from the Madoff scam — and the Picower estate settled the claims against it for a whopping $7.2 billion. (Picower himself died in 2009, apparently after experiencing a massive heart attack while swimming at his Palm Beach estate.)

That’s a bit depressing, isn’t it? Let’s move on to a happier subject: Bill Zabel’s remarkable legal career. The Princeton and Harvard Law School graduate has long been a leading light in the world of trusts and estates — but he’s most proud of his pro bono work, and justifiably so. From his SRZ bio:

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For more than 50 years, Bill has been an advocate for social justice in the United States and abroad. His civic and philanthropic activities have included, among many others, authoring the amicus brief on behalf of the ACLU in Loving v. Virginia, investigating the cases of those who disappeared in Chile during General Augusto Pinochet’s “Dirty War,” serving as chair of Human Rights First, chair of Immigrant Justice Corps, trustee or director of New York University, The New School, Mailman School of Public Health, The JPB Foundation (vice chairman), The Lymphoma Foundation, chair of the Princeton University Planned Giving Committee, Sakharov Archives, Lincoln Center Theater and The Academy of American Poets.

His involvement in the Loving case — which returned to prominence in the past few years, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, followed a year later by the critically acclaimed Loving film — is a highlight. As Zabel told the Financial Times:

[H]is proudest civil rights achievement was Loving v. Virginia. Years later, after a speech he made when accepting the Robert F Kennedy Prize for advancing racial and social justice, three women of mixed race approached him. “They said they wanted to thank me because they wouldn’t be alive today if their parents couldn’t have married,” he says. “That was priceless.”

Bill and Deborah Zabel’s apartment, though, does have a price: $4.2 million. It also comes with a sizable monthly maintenance bill — $5,653, bigger than most people’s mortgages — and because the building allows for no more than 30 percent financing, the buyer will have to put down almost $3 million, assuming it goes for list price (which isn’t guaranteed, given the challenging market for high-end homes). In exchange for all that, the new owner will enjoy three bedrooms (one of them currently used as a library), two-and-a-half bathrooms, and a tony Park Avenue address.

Let’s take a look around, shall we?

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