Mechanic name is stamped all over Manhattan's biggest real estate deals.

His name has practically become eponymous with big real estate deals. Indeed, Jon Mechanic has been the real estate lawyer behind countless major transactions, dotting i's, negotiating terms and, in general, facilitating the kind of deals that continue to make Manhattan everyone's favorite eye popping, jaw dropping spectator sport.

It's amazing to tally just how many large deals he has actually been a part of. Sometimes it seems as if his consultation represents some kind of gold standard in deal making, as if those who have billions of dollars on the line in a transaction will entrust only him.

He represented Tishman Speyer in its $5.4 billion acquisition of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village in recent months, the highest price ever paid for a residential asset.

He had a worthy warm up to that deal just weeks before, representing Broadway Partners in its $4 billion purchase of a portfolio of commercial properties from Beacon Partners.

More recently, Fried Frank Harris Shriver & Jacobson, where Mechanic is chairman of the firm's real estate practice, represented Macklowe Properties in its $7 billion purchase of a portfolio of Manhattan office buildings from Equity Office Properties.

His profile in the industry is on par with his professional accomplishments. It's easy to find him on real estate panels palling around with buddies like Cushman & Wakefield's president and CEO Bruce Mosler and Vornado president Mike Fascitelli.

Fried Frank's annual party, which is widely known simply as Jon Mechanic's party, is considered by real estate bigwigs the can't miss event of the holiday season, where any mover and shaker worth his or her salt will gather to mingle within the cavernously elegant Cipriani 42nd Street.

At last year's event, Mechanic greeted those he knew well with kisses on the cheek and at one point led Helena Durst through the thick throngs that gathered around them, the courtier to real estate royalty who has become a star himself. If there were a Rat Pack for the real estate industry, he'd undoubtedly be in it.

The man's resume is illustrious, his work prodigious, his savvy deal making the stuff of legend, and yet there is still something surprising and a little strange about Jon Mechanic's celebrity. While it appears reasonable to expect that such status should be bequeathed to anyone in possession of effortless charm and success--not to mention someone who helped arrange over $15 billion of real estate transactions in little over a few months--it nonetheless seems reserved most of the time for the maverick dealmakers, the dashing CEOs, the rags to riches real estate investors--those who receive all the credit and adulation for deals that their lawyers spent the weekend and wee hours of the night putting together.

Yes, real estate lawyers are that tragically unheralded group who operate behind the scenes making transactions happen, wading through hours of grueling grunt work to hammer out deal structures and negotiate terms only to miss by miles the opportunity to bask in the recognition of their accomplishment once the deal is complete.

And perhaps it's for the best. To really convey what they do, a real estate lawyer would undoubtedly have to resort to a professional vernacular stuffed with the kind of awe inspiringly unexciting jargon that only a description of a deal's clauses, liabilities and stipulations could elicit.

Mechanic, of course, is that rare exception. Perhaps it's because the cruxes of the deals he works on sometimes relate more to his personality and reputation than legal minutiae. At the end of 2006 for instance, Mechanic represented the law firm Dechert in its roughly 234,000 s/f lease at 1095 Avenue of the Americas. The deal got done just before the building fell under the control of the Blackstone Group, which completed its purchase of the building's former owner, Equity Office Properties, only a few months later.

Blackstone grabbed headlines for bumping up rents on MetLife, a tenant that came to the building for a 410,000 s/f lease, and for outright turning away the law firm Goodwin Procter, who had been trying to take more than 200,000 s/f, in order to keep the space free until the market drove the building's rents even higher.

The Equity Office team that handled leasing in the building was known to have delayed deals so that Blackstone could review and possibly veto leases, but Dechert managed to slip in under the wire nonetheless, paying rents far cheaper than it would have under Blackstone and avoiding the new owner's withering scrutiny. It is widely known that Mechanic's rapport with the Equity Office leasing team in the weeks preceding Blackstone's takeover played a prominent role in expediting Dechert's deal so that it could get done on such favorable terms.

Chalk it up to his engaging style or his legal know-how, these are the kind of deals that add to his fame and are, at the same time, perhaps also enabled by it. What other lawyer after all would have that kind of sway with a leasing team bent on landing the richest deal possible in order to reel in a prowling suitor?

Why, not a lawyer at all, but a personality that has become a fixture in the industry.