Managing Partner
On September 16, 2026, Law360 Real Estate Authority published “25 Years Later, Real Estate Lawyers Reflect On Sept. 11,” by Andrew McIntyre. The piece gathered accounts from New York real estate lawyers on where they were that morning, what the practice of law looked like in the weeks that followed, and how the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan changed the city. James F. Woods, founder and managing partner of Woods Lonergan, contributed alongside attorneys from Sheppard Mullin, Blank Rome, Fried Frank, and Joshua Stein PLLC.
What follows is a summary of Jim’s account, which draws on twenty-five years of commercial real estate litigation in New York. The full article is available to Law360 subscribers at the link below.
The morning of
Jim grew up in New York and had several family members who were firefighters responding to the World Trade Center that morning. His brother was preparing to open a restaurant less than a mile from the site and watched the towers come down. The firm, then in Midtown, stopped in place, not knowing what would happen next and waiting to hear that everyone was accounted for.
Leases that had never been tested
Before 2001, the casualty and force majeure clauses in a commercial lease were rarely negotiated. They were drafted for fire and flood, went in as standard language, and had almost never been litigated. What happened downtown was something no lease had contemplated. Many buildings were structurally sound and completely unreachable: streets closed, power out, and in some cases an active recovery site at the door.
Tenants stopped paying rent for space they could not enter. Landlords sued. The leases had no clear answer, because they addressed damage to the building rather than loss of access to it. That was half of the commercial lease disputes that followed. In the other half, the counterparty was simply gone: the tenant had failed, the operator had closed, and what remained was the personal guaranty. As Jim put it, “That pattern returns in every downturn.”
Twenty years of drafting
The industry spent the next two decades negotiating those terms in earnest: abatement for inaccessibility, force majeure spelled out rather than assumed, and defined business interruption requirements. Those clauses read the way they do because of 9/11. Then COVID-19 tested them again. They had been written around damage and physical access, and a government order closing a business that was otherwise fine did not fit. Twenty years of drafting still had not anticipated a pandemic, and a new round of breach of contract and lease and guaranty litigation followed.
A neighborhood where there had been none
Before 9/11, the Financial District was strictly a nine-to-five commercial area. People worked there and went home, and there was little reason to be downtown on a weekend. Some change was already in motion; the Hudson River Park Act had been signed in 1998, though most of the build-out came after 2001. After the attacks, the city and state put incentives in place to keep the area from going dark, and what followed was the creation of a neighborhood: residents, schools, restaurants, visitors, and hotels in a part of the city that had barely had any. Much of that hospitality development was financed with EB-5 capital.
The reconstruction of the sixteen acres destroyed on 9/11 and the damaged buildings around them continued for years, and the private build-out ran alongside it. That growth produced its own docket: investor and partnership disputes over hotel projects, hotel management agreement disputes, and commercial lease disputes in the retail and restaurant space on the ground floors of the same buildings.
Conversions, and what comes next
The other major change downtown was conversion. Office buildings became apartments, and a district that emptied at six o’clock became a place where people lived. That happened largely because of the same incentives. Conversion is now the city’s answer to a problem it has everywhere, too much office space and not enough housing, and Lower Manhattan is proof that it works at scale because it already happened there.
It is also proof that conversion comes with growing pains. In Jim’s words: “Buildings converted under time pressure may produce sponsor disputes, construction defect claims and governance fights in condominium and cooperative structures that did not exist in those buildings before.” He expects more of that, in more neighborhoods: sponsor transition and construction defect claims, co-op and condo board governance fights, and unit owner and derivative claims in buildings that were offices a few years earlier.
Twenty-five years on
The repercussions of that day are still working through the city’s buildings, leases, and courtrooms. Jim’s closing point is a simple one: New York proved resilient, and the city is more dynamic today than it was before.
Read the article
“25 Years Later, Real Estate Lawyers Reflect On Sept. 11,” by Andrew McIntyre, Law360 Real Estate Authority, September 16, 2026 (subscription required): https://www.law360.com/real-estate-authority/commercial/articles/2524425/25-years-later-real-estate-lawyers-reflect-on-sept-11
Woods Lonergan represents owners, developers, sponsors, boards, and investors in real estate and asset litigation, real estate development and project disputes, and cooperative and condominium governance matters throughout New York City.