Who We Are, What We Do, and How We Do It
Gromet & Associates is a commercial real estate transactional and real estate/business litigation firm located in Orange County, California. The basic premise of the Firm is to bring sophisticated, creative, responsive, customized and personalized legal services to its clients, the kind of service that smaller firms are best equipped to provide. We work directly with our clients’ principals, senior management and project personnel to facilitate clear and efficient communication of our clients’ objectives and intended method of transaction execution or litigation strategy.
Our clients are local and international; they are large and small; they are developers, builders, land entitlement firms, mortgage lenders, contractors, specialty consultants, private equity sponsors and commercial brokerage houses. They own individual office buildings, retail shopping centers, hotels, industrial parks and land; they buy and sell their real estate holdings regularly. They hire construction contractors, obtain secured acquisition, construction, permanent and mezzanine financing. Our clients lease out and manage their properties; they occasionally have to evict tenants. Some of our clients purchase distressed properties directly at foreclosure, through bank and private lender REO purchases, through loan auctions or through negotiated short sales.
Our clients also include escrow companies, title insurance companies, brokers, receivers, architects, civil engineers and other professionals that serve the real estate industry.
Our secured lending clients hire receivers and foreclose on borrowers. To acquire, hold and/or finance their real estate holdings, most of our real estate, mortgage lending and broker clients form single purpose limited partnerships, limited liability companies, and/or corporations. Many of our clients have established their own investment entities, and form ventures with private equity sources. In so doing, they consider and negotiate among themselves issues such as equity requirements, profit allocations, return on investment triggers, management compensation, governance and impasse resolution issues, and must consider the inocme tax impacts of contributions, distributions and conveyances, securities laws implications, all the while keeping in mind their exit strategy.
For all these activities, our clients need experienced lawyers who can provide sophisticated, responsive and creative legal representation.
We provide that representation.
We prefer to work closely with our clients early in our representation so we are not guessing what our clients’ needs and wants are. We often impose a discipline on our clients at the front end of a contemplated transaction, to help them better focus on their own goals and strategies. As a result, the first draft of documents we produce for our clients in a transaction is usually close to the mark. We know clients don’t like to lose time and to pay more to have their lawyers redraft and redraft. Underlying this approach is our desire to generate the best value for our clients; we believe this helps Gromet & Associates remain a valuable business tool for our clients and fosters good, and enjoyable, working relationships between attorney and client. We understand the key to remaining employed as legal counsel is to be a reliable resource to our clients’ businesses.
Since the founding of Gromet & Associates in 1996, the firm’s practice has been broadly based within the discipline of commercial real estate. Stevan Gromet, the managing principal of the Firm, has over 30 years of experience as a commercial real estate lawyer, and has been involved in a wide variety of real estate and related business transactions. Mickey Adkinson, of counsel to the Firm, has over 10 years of experience, and adds both sophisticated real estate and corporate/securities expertise to the Firm, as well as a deep understanding of title insurance matters.
In 2010, Brian Davis, a talented real estate and business litigator with several years of experience, joined the Firm as a principal. Mr. Davis brings litigation capability to the firm at a time when real estate investments and projects are stressed or broken; as a result our clients require knowledge and expertise in understanding not only legal rights and obligations of various parties involved in complex real estate projects, but the practical reality of how such rights can best be enforced, defended or, if possible, avoided. The current economic and real estate environment requires a melding of real estate transactional knowledge and litigation expertise which Gromet & Associates, with Mr. Davis’ addition to the Firm, can now provide. Mr. Davis also brings with him a broad expertise in general business and employment litigation matters for those clients of the Firm having legal needs in those areas.