Stroock Adds to Firms Changing Leadership

Stroock & Stroock & Lavan announced on Tuesday that its longtime co-managing partner Stuart Coleman is stepping down to be replaced by Jeffrey Keitelman, who joined the firm last year.

Alan Klinger, co-chair of the litigation practice, will continue on as the other co-managing partner, a position he’s held since 2007.

In an interview Keitelman cast himself as a change agent: “With Alan comes continuity, with me comes a fresh look. And I think combined we’re loaded for bear.”

It adds to the growing list of law firms that have picked the summer of 2016 as the appropriate time to change leadership, which includes Cravath, McDermott Will & Emery, Venable, K&L Gates and other law firms.

Here are the facts served up for easy digestion:

• Keitelman joined Stroock in December 2015 with a team of seven attorneys from DLA Piper and immediately was made part of the firm’s executive committee.

• He is based in Washington, D.C. and co-chairs the firm’s real estate practice and is co-managing partner of the office. “I’ve been here about a year and a half. I’ve actually piled a lot of stuff into that year and a half period,” said Keitelman.

• He advises on commercial real estate transactions, and past clients have included “The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in all real estate aspects of its redevelopment of the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan.”

• The executive committee voted 8-0 to make Keitelman co-managing partner of the firm. That included the support of Coleman, who had been co-managing partner since 2004 and has been at the firm since 1979.

• Coleman will remain on the executive committee and continue leading the firm’s investment management practice group. Contacted Tuesday, he declined to comment.

• Asked about his priorities as the new co-managing partner, Keitelman cited taking advantage of new technology to make the firm’s lawyers more efficient and more competitive. He said he will ask someone from IBM to speak to the firm about how it could take advantage of Watson, the artificial intelligence technology.

• He also cited growth, and did not rule out a possible merger. Noting the firm has 300 lawyers, and about 90 partners, Keitelman said, “You’d think that firms like us maybe need to consider growing. That’s certainly on the drawing board.”

• First order of business: Talk to the firm’s lawyers and write up a strategic vision for the executive committee, then execute on that, said Keitelman.

“We’ve had a co-managing partner governance in place for many years, and it’s served us well,” he said. “But it’s time for half a change, and that’s what we did.”