Law Firm King & Spalding Relocating to 175K SF at 1290 Avenue of the America

The length of the lease was unclear, but a source with knowledge of the deal said the asking rent was $105 per square foot and King & Spalding will occupy the 13th through 15th floors of the building.

Vornado declined to comment. King & Spalding did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It’s unclear who brokered the deal.

King & Spalding will only expand by about 6,000 square feet in the move from the 169,000 square feet it currently occupies a few doors down at SL Green Realty’s 1185 Avenue of the Americas, where the law firm has been for about 20 years.

Currently, the largest tenant in 1290 Avenue of the Americas is investment firm Neuberger Berman, which has about 400,000 square feet in the building. The newest lease leaves 200,000 square feet available in the property, according to the source.

While Vornado is the majority owner, The Trump Organization holds about a 30 percent passive stake in the building, according to the Post.

King & Spalding is yet another law firm that has leased up a large block of space in Manhattan recently. That includes Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison which signed a 20-year deal for 765,000 square feet at Fisher Brothers’s 1345 Avenue of the Americas in late December. It was the largest office lease of 2023.

Law firms took the majority of space leased in the fourth quarter of 2023 — about 17.2 percent of 6 million square feet of leasing volume, according to a report from JLL. And four out of the top 10 largest leases in the city last year were from law firms.

“This mass migration is mostly because one or two firms move and set off a chain reaction of other firms trying to up their game to compete for talent,” Andrew Lim, JLL’s New York director of research, told Commercial Observer.

Mark Hallum can be reached at mhallum@commercialobserver.com.