Weil, Gotshal & Manges, one of New York’s signature law firms and a fixture of midtown’s office market for more than half a century, formally voted on Tuesday to dissolve, with partners approving the dissolution by a 97 percent margin. The vote ends the run of a firm that has anchored the General Motors Building at 767 Fifth Avenue since the tower opened in 1968, and it immediately creates a practical question for the city’s office lenders: what happens to a trophy tower when its biggest tenant disappears.
Weil’s footprint is substantial. The firm leases 447,075 square feet in the GM Building through August 2034 and remains its largest tenant. When the building’s $2.3 billion loan was securitized in 2017, Weil alone accounted for 19.4 percent of gross rent, and that loan matures in June 2027 — right as its anchor credit is winding down. Data firm CRED iQ, which profiled the exposure this week, found that Top 100 law firms rank among the five largest tenants in 99 office buildings backing $35.4 billion of commercial mortgage-backed securities across 192 deals, with 55 percent of that debt located in New York.
The broader lesson, analysts say, is concentration. Law firms sign long leases and pay their bills, so buildings anchored by them default less often — about 9 percent of law-firm-heavy CMBS office debt sits in special servicing versus 15.8 percent for office CMBS overall. But when a firm leaves, the vacancy is enormous. In one cautionary example, Covington & Burling’s 197,450 square feet in the New York Times Building now sit vacant after a $635 million loan defaulted at its December 2025 maturity.
Manhattan’s trophy towers are largely insulated: Cravath’s 519,415-square-foot lease at Two Manhattan West runs to 2044, Debevoise & Plimpton occupies 530,722 square feet at the Spiral through 2042, and Paul Weiss renewed 765,956 square feet at 1345 Avenue of the Americas through 2047. Weil’s rivals have already begun absorbing its partners, and its restructuring group — historically the firm’s crown jewel — is reportedly in advanced talks to join Skadden en masse, which could quickly fill comparable midtown space elsewhere.
The timing lands awkwardly for a segment of the market that has otherwise been recovering. Manhattan office leasing jumped 54 percent in October, availability hit its tightest level since 2020, and asking rents have clawed back to pre-pandemic averages. But 27 of the buildings in the law-firm dataset carry $10.5 billion of debt maturing by the end of 2027, the GM Building among them. Lenders refinancing those towers will now underwrite not just whether the anchor firm is paying rent, but whether it still exists — a question nobody asked at the last debt peak. For a firm that helped invent modern bankruptcy law, Weil’s own ending has become the newest stress test for the landlords who housed it.
