Green sees development from both sides

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Michael Green’s legal work underpins a very public development underway in Madison: redevelopment of The Edgewater Hotel.

But some of his greatest lessons come from projects never to be seen.

Green is chairman of the transactional practice group at Michael Best & Friedrich LLP, where his work centers on real estate. He credits The Edgewater as one of the most layered and rewarding projects of his career, partly because it’s intertwined with the city where he lives with his wife, Ann, and their three teenage sons. However, he attributes a comprehensive awareness of projects’ legal intricacies to his two-year stint away from Michael Best working at a development firm that collapsed on the precipice of the recession.

Before the firm went under, Green said, he gained a wider view of “what worked and what didn’t” through small victories and more than a few failures as development interest and dollars dried up for projects in the Midwest and Florida in the late 2000s.

“You truly see everything from the client’s perspective,” he said, “and in real estate, you can really boil it down to that essential dollar-and-cents question.”

Keeping a full, reasoned view of client needs is a strength that Green’s colleague Mary Turke said she has come to expect from him. Turke said she regularly hands off real estate portions of her client’s work to Green because she appreciates his “calm and persistent” interactions, especially when up against “aggressive and challenging” clients, as found in the recent sale of an older property in Madison.

“I turn things over and [Michael] will keep me informed, but I never worry about it,” Turke said. “They’re all our clients, but he handles it as he would his own people.”

Through his private developer efforts bookended by time at Michael Best & Friedrich, Green said he’s learned being an attorney ultimately means he is “in a position to help others,” an element that’s reflected in his pro bono efforts with his parish, St. Maria Goretti, as well as a group that supports the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center.

“Don’t get me wrong, we get paid well to… be attorneys,” he said. “But there’s a reward to just being helpful.”