With Miami’s 125th birthday being celebrated this week, it seems only fitting that we look to the new and exciting opportunities in the Miami legal market that make it stand out from other markets in the country. Clearly Miami has always had a strong real estate market, for both residential and commercial purposes and recently, the real estate market has been really ramping up. With a significant influx of new arrivals from New York and California during the COVID-19 pandemic, the local supply of homes and apartments have not been able to keep up with the demand. On top of that, commercial real estate has also certainly seen an uptick as well. As the old saying goes, the official bird of Miami is the crane (of the construction variety) and new developments, like the one we toured earlier this summer at 17 Allapattah, have been going up non-stop. This certainly means that the demand for cutting-edge real estate and transactional attorneys will certainly be very high! These burgeoning developments seem to point to not only substantial growth of the real estate market, but also in the confidence investors have in the future potential of Miami.

This growing confidence has been fueled in no small part by the leadership of our local elected officials like Miami Mayor Francis Suarez. Mayor Suarez, who was elected back in 2017, has done a great job promoting Miami as the next tech/finance hub in the country. He’s recently been in the news for his “How Can I Help” campaign, where he assists people and companies in the tech industries move away from the traditional nodes in California and relocate them to sunny South Florida. So far, this has been a tremendous success, with thousands of high earning new jobs popping up here in Miami. With an influx of out-of-town business interests, there again seems to be a clear opportunity for transactional attorneys here in Miami to help guide corporate transitions, build ups and mergers. Another less obvious but still very exciting potential for the local Miami legal market is the demand for government relations attorneys. Many people and companies who will want to do business with the government here in Miami will need seasoned and expert advice in doing so, as anyone who has worked with government here can tell you.

Finally, one of the niche tech interests that have started making its way to Miami is crypto-currency. This brand new area in finance and tech is sure to change the way we think about money, both in the personal and commercial aspect. As of yet, there is no firmly established center for crypto development and implementation; there is no “Silicon Valley” for Bitcoin, in other words. With that understanding, Mayor Suarez has attempted to attract this emerging industry to set itself up here in Miami and that has immense implications for the local legal community. As an emerging technology with immensely wide ranging applications, there is a dearth of established law regarding it. Miami is in a position to become a center of the emerging crypto jurisprudence, which will no doubt involve transactional, litigation, and government relations attorneys and in this way, Miami can be to crypto what Delaware is to corporate law. Local firms that can recognize this and prepare themselves accordingly, may very well be able to attract some of the biggest upcoming tech clients; the next Facebook, or Google. I, for one, look forward to being a young attorney in such a dynamic environment.