When looking for a real estate or land use attorney in the Hamptons, it’s best to shop local.
By combining big city tenacity with deep ties to the Hamptons community, the Adam Miller Group helps clients navigate cases ranging from simple transactions to complex development projects involving evolving zoning regulations and fifty-year-old tax maps. We sat down with the partners from the Adam Miller Group for a look behind the scenes at the enigmatic world of Hamptons real estate and land use law and how their firm is purpose-built to give clients every advantage.
Farm-to-table legal services
Miller cut his legal teeth in Manhattan at Proskauer Rose, LLP, where he learned the ins and outs of the real estate transaction process, even representing a client buying the World Trade Center. In 2003, he moved his family to the Hamptons and hung his own shingle, drawing on his experience in the city to build a practice that combined the capabilities and work ethic of a major firm with the intimate knowledge of a local attorney.
“I wanted to create kind of a mini large firm out east,” he explains. “If you surround yourself with great people, it will be a recipe for success”, he thought.
His vision was simple: build a team of Hamptons attorneys with ties to the community and knowledge about the area’s many esoteric land use regulations. He compares the advantage of this approach to the way that farm-to-table restaurants source ingredients and draw inspiration for their menus from their surroundings.
“From the health department to geothermal cubes that are put under the ocean floor to mitigate erosion, it can get very technical,” he says. “We have bountiful counsel in our firm that can navigate each of these complexities.”
Miller, who, even after 22 years of living in the Hamptons, refuses to call himself a local, has brought on partners who grew up in the area: Denise Schoen was born in East Hampton and currently lives in Sag Harbor, where she served as the Village Attorney for 10 years; Brian Locascio has lived in Sag Harbor his entire life and made connections while working for a local title company before joining the Adam Miller Group; and Jameson McWilliams, who joined the firm in April, grew up in Southampton and served as the East Hampton Deputy Town Attorney prior to joining the Firm.
Writing the book on gross floor calculation
In many ways, McWilliams is the perfect example of Miller’s approach to building his team. As East Hampton Deputy Town Attorney, she helped write a recent suite of zoning changes passed by the town, making her the foremost expert on a series of regulations that impact nearly every client who walks into the Adam Miller Group’s office.
While the change to the gross floor area calculation has gotten the most attention in the press, the other zoning code updates, including new Certificate of Occupancy requirements, have wide-reaching, and often subtle, ramifications and need to be dealt with in the initial negotiation of the contract.
“The nuances of the changes have literally come into play every week with multiple clients,” says McWilliams, who probably knows the new regulations better than anyone else (she recalls sitting through “hundreds of hours of meetings” about just the gross floor calculation). “All of the plans that people have must to be vetted intensely from the outset.”
Whether they’re considering buying a new property or filing permits to make changes to one they already own, clients who work with the Adam Miller Group have direct access to local experts like McWilliams.
“We saved him years of frustration”
The Hamptons are home to some of the most arcane overlapping zoning regulations in the country. Even families who have lived in the area for a century can benefit from Adam Miller Group’s counsel.
“We had a client that was under contract to buy a significant piece of property, seven acres on a farm field,” recalls Miller. The client wanted to build a single family home on the land, which was owned by a local family who had passed it down through the generations. “I was working on the transactional piece. Meanwhile, my partners were researching the viability of getting a building permit for this lot.”
Toward the end of the diligence period, the partners discovered an obscure problem: the farm, which had been subdivided according to the Town of Southampton, was not properly subdivided through the Suffolk County Health Department, essentially preventing it from being developed without an extensive additional permitting process and perhaps over a year of additional time. The client ended up terminating the deal. “We got a client for life now”, says Miller.
“We saved him years of frustration,” says Miller, “and now we’re representing the seller in trying to get the health department approval retroactively.”
This type of scenario is becoming increasingly common as the amount of land available for development in The Hamptons shrinks every year. Ironically, an obscure 1981 tax map has become the centerpiece in a number of land use cases the Adam Miller Group has taken on.
“What’s kind of bizarre and crazy is that the 1981 tax map is not something that’s available to just anyone,” says McWilliams, who told us how their firm got a copy of the map from a friend of Partner Denise Schoen as a Christmas gift. “I think we’re one of the only offices that has a hard copy.”
Redrawing the map
Not every case ends with a client scrapping their plans. Miller told us about a client who was able to get their dream home built on the waterfront thanks to a bit of “outside the box” thinking on the part of Denise Schoen, who has extensive land use experience.
In this case, the Zoning Board was claiming that the proposed site was too close to the coastal erosion hazard line. Schoen, an East Hampton native with a knack for zoning law, believed that the line had been improperly drawn. Determined to prove this, she garnered a team of experts for the case.
“We called coastal geological experts and got reports from them, then we went to New York State with factual evidence which proved that this line was not drawn in the right place,” says Miller. “The state moved the line, which allowed the client to develop his home on the ocean without having the need to go before the Zoning Board of Appeals.”
It was the kind of win that clients would expect from a major Manhattan firm, but it was pulled off by the Adam Miller Group’s team of local attorneys.
Whether you’re eyeing a slice of Hamptons real estate or are looking to renovate your Hamptons home, reach out to the Adam Miller Group today. You want them on your side.