Nina Roket Is the Switch-Hitter of New York Commercial Real Estate Law

Nina Roket, co-managing partner at the law firm Olshan Frome Wolosky, was born to a Jewish family of mostly medical professionals in the then-Soviet nation of Georgia. 

Sitting in her firm’s Midtown conference room, Roket tells of the time in 1961 when Benjamin Mirilashvili, her paternal grandfather and owner of a successful trade and exporting business, was taken by force from his home.

He was never seen or heard from again.

“It was a pretty traumatic experience. He left my grandmother with four children,” Roket, 54, tells Commercial Observer. “I’ve heard stories about my grandfather in terms of what an honorable man he was, what a powerful man he was, and how what had happened was so very surprising, even back then.”

This horrible, life-changing event intensified the family’s desire to eventually relocate to the U.S., which they did when Roket was 2 years old.

“They gave up everything,” said Roket — whose last name is pronounced row-KET — noting that the family settled in Forest Hills, Queens. “They came to this country and were treated like aliens, because they didn’t know the language or the culture. But through very, very hard work, they put everything together. My father and each of his siblings became doctors here and raised families. That’s the American dream, right? My parents were probably in their mid-20s. My grandmother realized there was an opportunity for her children to have a better life, and they took advantage of it. All of this was very much a part of my upbringing.”

Roket clearly inherited this intense drive.   

A graduate of Fordham University and New York Law School, Roket has been with Olshan since 1998, just two years after earning her law degree. 

Rising quickly within the firm — she made partner in 2005, and was promoted to co-managing partner four years later — she has become much sought after for the razor-sharp skills in strategy and negotiation she’s exhibited while handling some of the larger and more complex deals in commercial real estate.

Along with Olshan real estate partner Jessica Stanton, Roket recently represented Convene Hospitality Group in its 50,000-square-foot lease for a three-level space at Terminal Warehouse, the first signed lease in the 1.3 million-square-foot Chelsea redevelopment that is the largest adaptive reuse project in New York City history.

Roket represented Williams Equities in its $147.5 million purchase of 470 Park Avenue South, which had previously sold for $245 million. Working with others from the firm, she negotiated JEMB Realty’s $300 million refinancing of Herald Center in Midtown, restructuring a complex stack of preferred equity and commercial mortgage-backed securities debt. Roket and Stanton also represented Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, parent company of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets and the WNBA’s New York Liberty, on the lease for the site of its new $80 million, 75,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art practice facility.    

Roket, Olshan’s first female equity partner and executive committee member, is co-chair of the firm’s real estate practice, chair of the firm’s leasing practice, co-leader of its loan restructuring and distressed real estate practice, founder of the firm’s women’s committee and chair of its hiring committee.   

Her success as a top-flight strategist and negotiator is all the more surprising when you learn that young Roket struggled with painful shyness.

But her family’s background provided a level of motivation even greater than that which might have held her back.

“The story of my grandfather really stuck with me,” said Roket. “Like, how is a person just taken from their home, never to be heard from? There were stories that he was in prison somewhere in Siberia, and was either starved to death or starved himself to death. I don’t know. So many stories stuck with me. Growing up, hearing about this family that came from a country of lawlessness, it impacted me. I got very interested in the law. It inspired me to look further into how is society built? What is it built on?”

At the time, it hadn’t occurred to her that shyness could be an issue for a lawyer.

“I didn’t know what I was getting into,” Roket said of her initial pursuit of a law career. “I just felt very strongly about that desire to understand how what happened to my grandfather could have happened. It stuck with me.”

Buoyed by her family’s inspiration in overcoming challenges, Roket spent her school years facing her reticence head on.

“I tell people who didn’t know me then that I was very shy, and nobody believes me,” said Roket, whose shyness did steer her away from becoming a litigator. “I put myself in positions where I’d have to overcome those challenges, probably because that’s what I saw my family do. I purposefully joined the debate club, and signed myself up for speaking engagements in college or law school. I’m still generally a shy person, but I know how to handle it better.”

After working on trusts and estates for a solo practitioner for about a year after law school, Roket was headhunted into Olshan as a junior real estate associate. She was thrown into the world of corporate refinancings and office leases, settling in with some comfort, especially for the latter.

“People don’t realize that in commercial leasing you actually have to come up with creative solutions,” said Roket. “Sometimes in loan financings, there’s very limited leeway in terms of how you can negotiate various provisions or positions for clients. When it comes to commercial leasing, there’s actually a far wider ability to come up with solutions that may not be exactly what your client wants, but are also not exactly what the other side doesn’t want. So you’re able to say, ‘OK, if X doesn’t work, then I’ve got three other possible ways to make this deal work to get to a place of yes.’ ”

Eric Goldberg, who hired Roket at the firm in 1998 and is now her co-chair in the firm’s real estate division, compares Roket to a switch-hitter in baseball given the unconventional blend of skills she brings to her role.

“Nina built her practice as a leasing attorney, but she developed her own skill sets to handle finance and acquisitions, and she takes the lead on those now, which is unusual,” said Goldberg. “Not many attorneys do both. She does both easily. That makes her quite unique among real estate lawyers in New York.”

Roket takes a systematic approach to working with clients on lease deals, going through contracts and breaking down their issues into three or four buckets — such as construction, legal and business — then offering her perspective on each.

In the case of Convene’s Terminal Warehouse lease, construction issues were paramount. 

“Construction is a big one: making sure that the opening happens when it’s supposed to happen, and that what we are given is actually what we need to be able to build the way we need to build,” said Roket. “Another issue is minimizing liability. And subletting was also a major issue from the tenant’s perspective — having the flexibility they need to be able to grow or do something different from what is initially expected. There are a lot of legal issues with compliance and delivery.”

By her own telling, Roket is not a combative attorney. She favors collaboration over conflict in negotiations, and considers herself more of a problem-solver than a warrior going to battle for her clients.

“I always say: If there’s a deal to be had, if my clients want to get the deal done, then it’s on me as their advocate to make sure it gets done, and to come up with solutions to help them get it done, as opposed to coming up with roadblocks,” said Roket. “I’m not going to be the lawyer who says, ‘We have an issue.’ I’m always the lawyer that says, ‘Here’s the hurdle. We’re not getting exactly what we wanted, but I think we could get there with solution A, or solution B or solution C,’ and then I talk through those alternatives and give my clients recommendations.”

Roket credits her negotiating success to her keen ability to listen, to stay calm, and to do her best to ensure that both sides walk away happy by the time a deal is signed.

“You have to understand what the other side is trying to achieve and take a moment to really analyze how can I give them what they’re looking for while still maintaining what my client needs — to defuse, as opposed to escalate, as much as possible,” said Roket.

Of course, commercial real estate deals are often (usually?) more cutthroat than all of this sounds. But Roket’s vast experience has shown her that the collaborative approach, which seeks mutual benefit over singular advantage, is usually the winning one, even when the other side walks in the door ready for a brawl.

“You’ve got to figure out a way to deal with it. You’ve always got to find a way to ‘yes,’” said Roket. “I always keep coming back to that. I keep my client’s goals in mind, and I try to be practical. I’m not going to win every single point. I’m going to have to fight and win the points that are most important to my clients.”

With so many potential issues on any deal, the ability to prioritize them for maximum advantage is a prized skill all its own.

Roket represented building owners Himmel + Meringoff and the Swig Company on the establishment of Foot Locker’s Times Square flagship store, negotiating key issues such as which side was responsible for the various permits when both the owner and the tenant handled different aspects of the buildout. It would go on to win the Real Estate Board of New York’s top retail deal award in 2016.

“It was an important deal because it was right off Times Square, and there was a huge signage component to it,” said Roket. “There was a question of in what order do you deal with who’s responsible for getting initial use permits and getting the [temporary certificate of occupancy] closed, so that was a big deal. A lot of what I do is construction-related because I do a lot of owner representation, and many of these projects have extensive work letters. So going through those construction nuances and really negotiating those use clauses and getting those permits right was pretty involved.”

Roket began working with the real estate development, investment and management firm JEMB Realty about a year or two into her time at Olshan, and has now worked with different generations of the firm’s management on office leasing, financing, refinancing and more.

The deal for the company’s $300 million refinancing of the conversion of Herald Center at 34th Street and Broadway in 2025 had components that included CMBS debt, preferred equity and a commercial condo.

“Dealing with all those nuances at the same time was very involved, and a great example of the Olshan team working together,” said Roket. “We had five or six attorneys — who all happened to be women, by the way, which I was very proud of — working on this transaction, and it was all hands on deck. Dealing with a CMBS lender is always very challenging, but dealing with it while we’re going through a condo conversion was a lot.”

Joseph L. Jerome, who co-founded JEMB with Chairman Morris Bailey in 1990 and now serves as the company’s president, notes that JEMB’s long relationship with Roket and Olshan has often been driven by Roket’s judgment in smartly prioritizing the many issues involved in deals of varying complexity.

“Nina is an attorney who likes to make a deal and not complicate it,” said Jerome. “She understands why each side needs whatever they need, and we always come to a decent compromise. We were doing a pretty large Fannie Mae loan, and the existing lender was being difficult in assigning his mortgage for an agency deal. She was able to overcome that and get us where we had to be. That’s just one example of her ability to move things towards closing.”

For a more detailed example of her negotiating and legal acumen, Roket shares a tale of a significant loan refinancing in which the lenders decided to ask for a substantial fee — which Roket did not believe they were entitled to — at the 11th hour.

“We had a difficult situation because if we didn’t pay the fee, then we weren’t going to be able to get what we needed in order to close, and, if we paid the fee, how would we ever get that money back?” said Roket. “They were very firm in their position that they were entitled to the fee, and we were clear in our position that they weren’t. The lender said, ‘If you pay a reduced fee and give us a release, we’ll close.’ ”

But the reduced fee was still significant, and, if Roket’s client gave the lender a release, it would leave them with no recourse to recover the fee moving forward. 

So Roket recommended to her client that they pay the full fee with no release, then demand full repayment after the deal closed. The risk paid off. 

“We went back after closing and demanded payment, and we were successful,” said Roket. “It was a gamble, but I said to the client, ‘I feel pretty confident that we’re going to get there.’ Ultimately, I needed to close. I wasn’t jeopardizing a significant transaction. I got my client what they needed, which was closing the loan, and then I got my client the money back after the closing.”

These days, Roket is also passing along her legal wisdom by serving as a mentor to younger attorneys in the firm, especially women. Roket is a founder and leader of the firm’s women’s committee, and steers this in part to provide younger female associates with an aspect of mentorship that was unavailable to her.

“When I was growing up, my mentors were fantastic, but they were men,” said Roket, who has been married for 35 years and has a 34-year-old daughter who’s a corporate intellectual property attorney at another firm. “I can’t say anything negative about them, but it would have been nice to have a woman in a senior position that I could look to and say, ‘Here she is with a family going through the things I was going through,’ so that I could relate at a certain level.”

For a woman who was initially driven to the law by a family tragedy that made her question society’s foundations, it appears that all these years later Roket has arrived at a solid answer: Society works best when people work together to provide the best possible opportunities for all involved.

“What helped me grow my career was helping myself develop the business that I developed,” said Roket. “Very early on, I was going to events and participating in various organizations, and I thought to myself, ‘If I’m having success individually, what if we did it as a group? What if the attorneys here at the firm were able to come together as a group to build a platform that really fostered business development?’ So I went to a colleague who agreed, and she and I went to firm leadership and explained to them that the idea is to give women an opportunity to network together to see if we could have greater success. And we have. 

“It’s been incredible to see how networks and relationships have grown. I always stress that I very much want to develop a personal relationship with an individual before we start talking business. You share experiences, you share questions, you share recommendations. And, over time, people start to understand what it is you’re about, and they become more comfortable in figuring out if there’s a way for us to do business.”

Larry Getlen can be reached at lgetlen@commercialobserver.com.