Mild-mannered Polevoy never pulls any punches.

Martin Polevoy, partner, DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary

With a high corner office in midtown, you don't have to look out very far from Martin Polevoy's window to see some of the deals that he has done.

Just a few buildings away is 745 Seventh Avenue, the site where only a few years ago he was Lehman Brothers' attorney for a leasing deal in which the firm took hundreds of thousands of square feet of space.

Admittedly a little bit farther away, one can see the fast rising New York Times Building on Eighth Avenue, whose developer, real estate mogul Bruce Ratner, Polevoy represented in the complicated and labyrinthine negotiations with the city, state, and The New York Times Company itself to structure the deal.

Indeed, the head of the law firm DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary's real estate practice, Polevoy has a roster of clients that reads like a who's who list in the real estate world.

Besides Ratner and Lehman Brothers, Polevoy has been one of the lead attorneys representing the Port Authority in its recent highly publicized and seesawing negotiations with developer Silverstein Properties.

He has also hatched, in recent years, an impressive subspecialty representing a number of prominent German open-end real estate funds in their purchase of real estate and development projects in the United States--clients that required him to take on the formidable task of learning German and European Union real estate and tax laws.

Observing his prepossessing air and easygoing manner, not many would necessarily peg Polevoy for one of the most talented, prominent and prolific real estate attorneys in the city. Where's the bulldog, tough as nails persona that somehow seems to taint everyone's conception of the prototypical, if not stereotypical, corporate big gun lawyer?

"I leave that at the negotiating table," Polevoy says with an easy smile. He's joking.

In reality, and maybe to the disappointment of Law and Order fans, lease and development negotiations in the Big Apple don't always exactly achieve the kind of high drama some might think multi-million dollar deals would wring from their participants. There are always exceptions however.

At the base of the New York Times Building, the city called for aggressive allocations of public space, demands that Polevoy eventually helped negotiate so that they were acceptable to the developer as well. The city lawyers were no pushovers either, but rather had been converted into battle-hardened veterans from all their experience negotiating with the slew of talented developers who had, in the years preceding, taken turns erecting developments that spurred the revitalization of Times Square.

"If they had made mistakes, or undue concessions, they had made them with the developers before us," Polevoy said. "By the time they got to us, they were pretty tough."

"You have the city on one side and they are looking out for the public interest and yet the developer has to make sure that he can build a building that he's going to profit with. But there's going to be a great auditorium in the base of the New York Times Building and a public space where people can be that will be a great amenity to the office tenants in the building as well. It sounds like a cheesy line, but we really did work out a situation where both the city and Ratner and The Times all came out winners."

"That's part of why I love being involved in big transactions, because you know you're working with the best and the level of sophistication is both challenging and rewarding."

Although he sat opposite the public sector in that deal, he played the part of its advocate on September 12, 2001, when he remembers receiving a call from the Port Authority to provide legal counsel in its intense search for space to replace all the offices it lost in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

"I worked for months straight starting from that day and must have pulled eight all-nighters," Polevoy said. "But it was probably some of the most important work I've ever done."