The Brief:
Gilbert + Tobin rolls out a dedicated Real Assets team with 40-plus lawyers to chase institutional money flowing into property and infrastructure.
Partners Stuart Cormack and Ben Cosentino co-lead the practice, ditching the old silo model for one team across the whole deal.
Institutional capital doesn’t want five different lawyers for five different parts of a deal. Gilbert + Tobin has built the fix.
The firm has launched a dedicated Real Assets team, bringing property, infrastructure, finance, development and regulatory expertise under one roof instead of scattered across practice groups.
The team is co-led by partners Stuart Cormack, nearly nine years at the firm, and Ben Cosentino, who joined last year. They have more than 40 lawyers behind them, with partners Amanda Hempel, Nick Lazarou and Ben Fuller also part of the team.
The reasoning is that real estate and infrastructure deals are getting bigger, messier and harder to box into one category. Equity, debt and hybrid structures are all blurring together, so G+T wants clients to get M&A, banking and finance, development, planning and regulatory sign-off from the same team, start to finish.
We have built this team around the way our clients actually deploy capital, rather than the way law firms have traditionally been organised. That is what sets it apart.
Co-lead, Stuart Cormack adds that the days of treating real estate and infrastructure as separate worlds are over. “These deals are getting bigger and more capital intensive, and the line between real estate and infrastructure has all but disappeared. Clients get the best result when the finance, the equity, the asset, the development and the regulation are joined up from day one, and that is how we have built this team.”
The cross-disciplinary approach was already at work. Earlier this year, G+T advised Starwood Capital Group on financing Blackstone’s $1.2bn acquisition of Hamilton Island, with Cormack leading the financing workstream and Cosentino on asset due diligence — exactly the kind of mandate the new team was built for.
Source: Gilbert + Tobin