Real Estate, Construction & Infrastructure legal recruitment.

The full senior stack on the owner/operator side and the matching practices on the law-firm side. In-house, that means general counsel and chief legal officers, transactional counsel (acquisitions, dispositions, leasing, financing), securities and SEC-reporting lawyers for listed REITs, construction and claims counsel, project-finance and FERC/PUC regulatory lawyers, restructuring and workout specialists, and the AML/compliance counsel the new transparency regime now requires — see in-house counsel recruiting and compliance recruitment. For law firms, we place partners, groups and associates whose practices map to the same sub-sectors — partner recruiting and associate recruiting.

Acutely cyclical and rate-sensitive on the transactional side. Development and office-heavy platforms freeze or cut in high-rate environments, while three areas stay resilient or grow counter-cyclically: infrastructure and project finance — riding a record $2.3 trillion of global energy-transition investment in 2025, up 8% on 2024 (BloombergNEF, 2025) — plus hospitality and data-center work, and the construction-disputes and restructuring bar that grows when projects and loans sour. If your transactional pipeline has paused, the smartest hires are often on the other side of the cycle.

More than a generalist in-house seat. Compensation skews high at public REITs and institutional owners: the all-lawyer median wage is $151,160 (U.S. BLS, 2024), but median total general counsel pay at the largest U.S. companies reached $3.4M in 2024, up 20.5% from $2.8M in 2020 (Equilar, 2025), and the projected U.S. range for a general counsel is $222,750–$270,500 (Robert Half, 2026). Lean operators and contractors pay closer to generalist in-house bands. We benchmark the seat against the asset base and the public/private structure before we go to market. Read our salary insights to calibrate.

It is creating a new hiring need where one did not exist. FinCEN's beneficial-ownership transparency obligations — the Corporate Transparency Act and the Residential Real Estate Rule — are pulling AML and compliance counsel into real estate teams that historically had none, alongside the data-privacy and PropTech hiring that comes with a digitizing, cyber-exposed asset class. We help owners, developers and funds figure out whether they need a dedicated compliance hire, a reshaped GC mandate or specialist support — see what we do for companies.

Because this vertical is organized around the asset lifecycle, and a generalist can read a CV but cannot judge whether a lawyer has genuinely closed CMBS and mezzanine financings, negotiated a hotel management agreement, carried a construction claim through arbitration, structured a §1031 exchange or run REIT-tax and SEC-reporting work for a listed entity. The legal function sits at the center of every asset — acquisitions, leasing, contracting, financing, joint ventures, entitlements and regulatory compliance — so the judgment of who has actually done the work is the search. We map the asset, the cycle and the regulators before we map candidates; see our methodology.

Confidentially. We work with senior in-house counsel and legal-operations leaders at owners, developers, REITs, builders, hotel operators and infrastructure sponsors, and with law-firm partners and associates across real estate, construction, project finance, land use, REIT tax, restructuring and the construction-disputes bar. The vertical rewards transactional depth and sector fluency, offers strong GC compensation at public REITs and large developers, but is exposed to interest rates — so where you sit in the cycle matters to your next move. The first step is a discreet conversation, not an application into a black box. You can submit your CV in confidence.