Gromet & Associates

Gromet & Associates is a commercial real estate transactional firm located in Orange County, California. The basic premise of the Firm is to bring sophisticated, creative, responsive, customized and personalized legal services to its clients, the kind of service that smaller firms are best equipped to provide. We work directly with our clients' principals, senior management and project personnel to facilitate clear and efficient communication of our clients' objectives and intended method of transaction execution, including ancillary litigation strategies when implicated.



Our clients are local, regional and international; they range from large to small; they are developers, builders, land entitlement firms, mortgage lenders, contractors, specialty consultants, private equity sponsors and commercial brokerage houses. They own individual office buildings, retail shopping centers, hotels, industrial parks and land; they buy and sell their real estate holdings regularly. They hire construction contractors, obtain secured acquisition, construction, permanent and mezzanine financing.



Our clients lease out and manage their properties; they occasionally must evict tenants. Some of our clients purchase distressed properties directly at foreclosure, through bank or private lender REO purchases, through loan auctions or through negotiated short sales.



Our clients also include brokers, receivers, architects, civil engineers and other professionals that serve the real estate industry.



The Firm's secured lending clients hire receivers and foreclose on borrowers. To acquire, hold and/or finance their real estate holdings, most of our real estate, mortgage lending and broker clients form single purpose limited partnerships, limited liability companies, and/or corporations. Many of our clients have established their own investment entities, and form ventures with private equity sources. In so doing, they must consider and negotiate among themselves issues such as equity requirements, profit allocations, return on investment triggers, management compensation, governance and impasse resolution issues, and must consider the income tax impacts of contributions, distributions and conveyances, securities laws implications, all the while keeping in mind their exit strategy.



For all these activities, our clients need experienced lawyers who can provide sophisticated, proactive and creative legal representation. We provide that representation.



We prefer to work closely with our clients early in our representation so we are not guessing what our clients' needs and wants are. We often impose a discipline on our clients at the front end of a contemplated transaction, to help them better focus on their own goals and strategies. As a result, the first draft of documents we produce for our clients in a transaction is usually close to the mark. We know clients don't like to lose time and to pay more to have their lawyers redraft and redraft. Underlying this approach is our desire to generate the best value for our clients; we believe this helps Gromet & Associates remain a valuable business tool for Firm clients and fosters good, and enjoyable, working relationships between attorney and client. We understand the key to remaining employed as legal counsel is to be a reliable and cost-effective resource to our clients' businesses.



Since the founding of Gromet & Associates in 1996, the Firm's practice has been broadly based within the discipline of commercial real estate. Stevan Gromet, the managing principal of the Firm, has over 35 years of experience as a commercial real estate lawyer, and has been involved in a wide variety of real estate and related business transactions. Mickey Adkinson, starting her law practice in 1999, adds both sophisticated real estate and corporate/securities expertise to the Firm, as well as a deep understanding of title insurance matters. Jessie Kempf joined the Firm in 2015, adding transactional capacity and bringing to the Firm's practice substantial experience and proficiency in complex real estate transactions and finance. Michelle Hargrove joined the firm in 2018 and has extensive title, contract and financial experience. Chris Jenkins is Gromet & Associates' rising star, working on all aspects of the Firm's real estate transactions practice; Chris also assists in providing strategic and tactical real estate litigation counseling to the Firm's clients.