New York property owners lose value to three things: an inflated assessment, a family that cannot agree, and a plan nobody made. Property tax certiorari answers the first. Trusts and estates answers the other two.
New York attorney · Property tax certiorari
Family relationships · Business development
Open to the right next role
What a Practice Gets
What a trusts and estates group usually buys from an appraiser, a rainmaker, and a medical expert.
One building or portfolio often carries an entire estate. An audit challenges that reported value the same way a grievance challenges an assessment. The same four arguments win both fights: access, condition, restriction, comparables. That work happens here every day.
Sixty percent of revenue at the search firm came from clients won directly, not clients inherited. The same pattern runs through the property files. One parcel becomes a household, and a household brings the next one.
Capacity disputes turn on a physician’s note. A health science background reads that note without a translator. That saves an expert consult on files that do not need one. It also catches a record that cannot support the conclusion built on top of it.
The Work
Three years of files look like this: multi-parcel portfolios, rental buildings, and mixed-use property held through two generations.
The Argument
An assessment describes what a property looks like. The argument is about what someone can actually do with it: a waterfront classification with no water access, frontage nobody can build on.
The Conditions
A desktop assessment never registers what sits next to a building. The argument runs against traffic on the street and a substation next door. It runs against an easement that exists on paper and nowhere else.
The Family
Buildings are the smaller half of this work. The rest is about which family member signs and who pays. It is about who stopped speaking to whom. It is about whether a household can agree that a number is worth the fight. That trust resets every cycle.
Why It Carries Over
The same gap decides an estate. Real property is usually the largest asset in one, and the figure on the estate tax return is an argument, not a fact. That figure turns on access, condition, restriction, and what a buyer actually paid.
The Record
Names and representative matters are available on request. Each role follows the same arc: a complex environment, trust earned early, and work that outgrows the assignment it started as. Figures are rounded, come from firm records, and cover matters led or co-led.
annual firm revenue growth from payment and process systems built in-house
in assessed value under appeal in a year, from filing through resolution
less case-management time, after mapping where AI helps and where it does not
of search-firm revenue was repeat business from clients won directly, not inherited
first woman partner in the executive-search firm’s 40+ year history
clients won, managed, and expanded through direct C-suite relationships
Why Now
Siblings, cousins, and adult children in these property files started to ask about estate planning. They ask because the relationship already exists, and starting over with a stranger has no appeal. Every one of those matters currently goes to another firm.
Background
Nothing here was accidental. The seat these legs hold is a single client relationship: found, earned, kept, and grown.
Law
Law came after business on purpose. A relationship is worth nothing without something to deliver into it. The dual J.D./M.B.A. led to real-property valuation at a New York property-tax firm. The work covers valuations, appraisals, grievances, and appeals, negotiated directly with assessors and municipal officials.
Business
The first career ended at partner, age 25, in a forty-year-old executive-search firm that had never given the title to a woman. Nobody assigned the firm’s first outreach campaign, or the RFP process built to support it. Both won Fortune 50 engagements through direct relationships with C-suite leaders. Those accounts then expanded into other divisions.
Science
Genetics, pathophysiology, anatomy, and physiology were routine coursework. That training matters in an estate practice when capacity is in dispute. It makes the physician’s note behind a contested will readable, and shows where a diagnosis stops and a conclusion starts. B.S. in Health Science with chemistry minor.
One Seat
Three legs only matter if they hold up the same seat. Business taught how to find a client. Science taught how to earn trust fast. Law taught what to deliver once the trust is there. The seat is one relationship: found, earned, kept, and grown. Trusts and estates is the only practice where all four matter at once.
Experience
Four years in executive search came before law school. The skill that came out of it still brings in work.
Where Referrals Came From
The work was business development, start to finish. Four years there carried accounts from a cold first conversation through a signed engagement. Those accounts then renewed, and then opened doors into other divisions. Sixty percent of revenue was repeat business from clients won directly, not inherited. Trusts and estates grows the same way, and that part needs no learning.
Admitted in New York. J.D., cum laude, Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University. M.B.A., summa cum laude, Frank G. Zarb School of Business. B.S. in Health Science, cum laude, with a chemistry minor.
Sidney Storch Award, Ginsberg Fellowship, Betsy Malik Award, Health Law Fellow, and Notes & Comments Editor, Journal of International Business and Law, Vol. 20.
Postgraduate science coursework at Medgar Evers College. That training supports careful work with medical records, capacity questions, and the facts under a legal conclusion.
Fit
Four kinds of work that can come off your desk.
An Underserved Conversation
In many first-generation households nobody ever raised estate planning. The subject feels like bad luck. Meanwhile the assets are real and complicated: property abroad, a cash-heavy family business, an elder who speaks openly only in the language she trusts. These families are the next generation of estate-planning clients in New York. You reach them through someone they already trust, in a language they already speak.
Associate, of counsel, contract, or collaborative work in estate planning and administration. The fit is strongest where real property and family stewardship meet.
Valuation analysis and matter support where the estate’s largest asset turns on access, condition, restriction, comparable sales, and what a buyer actually paid.
Origination, and everything after it: retention, and expansion into the rest of a family. That helps if your practice has more capacity than clients.
Fiduciary work at a bank or trust company. Planned giving at a foundation or university. Elder-law matters where capacity and the medical record are in play.
Meet Navi
Calligraphy, amateur astronomy, and a small urban garden. A tomato plant takes a season to build and four days of August neglect to lose. Client trust runs on the same math. Both need water on the days nothing seems to be happening.
Fluent Punjabi and Hindi. Conversational Spanish.
