Charles Newman has been a business, commercial and real estate litigator in New York City for over three and a half decades. He started in the law firm of Fink Weinberger P.C., with a diverse practice. His early experience included smaller real estate and business litigation, and quickly led to a wide variety of increasingly sophisticated and varied cases. For example, he brought a lawsuit arising out of what was, at the time, the largest real estate transaction in the history of the world. Even after the other party appealed all the way to New York State’s highest court, it took only a matter of a few months and resulted in a complete victory. As his skills and experience seasoned, Mr. Newman also took over administration of the firm’s litigation department and coordinated all legal research for the firm.
Growing as a tenacious, thorough, respected and successful litigator, Mr. Newman had a clear insight that some lawyers never seem to develop. In most cases, the dispute is yesterday’s bad news. Business people have better things to focus on: tomorrow’s good deals.
Mr. Newman normally prefers to start cases on a respectful, cooperative footing with adversaries. Fighting about the fight rarely makes progress and can add substantial costs to the client, often with little payoff. Whenever he can, Mr. Newman focuses instead on getting an efficient and thoughtful resolution of the dispute that meets his clients needs in a cost-effective way.
That means being prepared to use all the litigation tools and methods that Mr. Newman has learned and created throughout his career. But also, it means helping his clients analyze their true needs and priorities, and gauging the other party’s motivations and interests. The intent is to find ways to short-circuit litigation to reach a negotiated resolution that maximizes Mr. Newman’s client’s outcome. For example, when newly representing a highly respected design and manufacturing firm as a general lawyer (not just as litigator), Mr. Newman met with management to get an overview of all their outstanding legal issues. The client had been a defendant for years in a patent infringement case outside New York. The president was scheduled to lose several days out of town to be grilled in a deposition. In a few minutes with his new client, Mr. Newman learned enough to propose a resolution that would end the case with no money paid, but the possibility of the parties doing a particular kind of mutually profitable business in the future. The case settled on those terms in days, and the president never had to leave his desk.
The ability to resolve cases in this way may depend on the other lawyer and client having common sense and good will. Such attributes, unfortunately, are not always on full display. There are some people who would just rather fight. Unavoidably, Mr. Newman has met many. He knows how to deal with them. He can be just as successful in full-bore litigation as he is in more efficient, less expensive cases.
To learn more about Mr. Newman and his litigation practice, please feel free to click to contact us, or call (212) 332-3321.
Mr. Newman’s instincts to learn about and address each party’s true concerns have informed his mediation practice. You can read more about mediation here.