Fred Klein, DLA Piper
DLA Piper's Fred Klein found himself in real estate law during his first year at Shaw Pittman in 1981, offered a choice between nine months of document review in Texas and helping sell four pecan farms and a processing plant in Georgia. His practice focuses on purchases, sales, financing and development deals, including repping companies in multibillion-dollar purchases. (What costs that much? Building portfolios and generating stations, for instance.) He also reps many offshore investors, such as German investment fund SEB in the May sale of an office building in San Francisco to a Chinese investor. The best part, he tells us, is mentoring young lawyers. (He even put together an eight-page outline of practice tips for associates, which he's shared with more than 100 since the early '90s.) Fred's been a Nats season ticket holder for 10 years, and this year made it to away games in six cities. (Although above we see Fred, his wife, and their three kids at, ahem, a non-Nats Red Sox game in Boston. Now that's true baseball devotion.)
