LaVon M. Johns
Partner
Riley Safer Holmes & Cancila LLP
Chicago
For nearly three decades, commercial real estate and transactions attorney LaVon M. Johns has solidified her reputation as go-to counsel for some of the nation’s most significant public/private partnership and nonprofit transactions.
As Partner and Leader of the Business Transactions group at Riley Safer Holmes & Cancila LLP (RSHC), Johns guides a team of attorneys responsible for key commercial transactions, including real estate, finance, corporate and supply chain. She has served as counsel on acquisitions, dispositions and financings for some of the most recognizable real estate and infrastructure projects in the United States.
A LEED-certified attorney, Johns has become a highly sought after dealmakerand lead counsel for multi-billion-dollar projects like the Skyway Toll Bridge and the proposed privatization of Midway Airport.
Johns joined RSHC at the close of 2022 to lead the firm’s Business Transactions Team. Since her arrival, she has focused on team management, internal infrastructure and growth, including instituting a training platform for the young attorneys on the Business Transactions Team.
In addition, Johns has contributed significant hours acting as in-house real estate counsel in conjunction with RSHC’s lease initiatives for its five office locations, including the relocation and build-out of three of these locations.
“I enjoy the real estate business because it affords me the opportunity to work with people of various disciplines to close the transaction,” Johns said. “It emphasizes my belief that ‘Teamwork, makes the dream work.’ I also enjoy traveling the country to see the final results of a commercial real estate project of which I have been engaged.”
Johns’ work in the last year includes advising a pool of institutional investors on issues related to real estate based investments; leading a nonprofit client in the development, construction, financing and leasing of a health complex on the Southside of the City of Chicago; and leading the finance business unit of the Business Transactions Team in a complex financing transaction that involved a multi-site, multi-state cross-collateralization project of a manufacturing and industrial company.
This doesn’t mean that building such a strong career has been easy. As Johns says, as a minority woman in a business still dominated by white men, she needed to work overtime to earn her place in the business.
When Johns started her career in 1996, there were few minority women in the legal profession that had established a career within BIGLaw with a practice focused on commercial real estate and finance transactions.
“I was challenged with building relationships within and outside the walls of my law firm. With the guidance and the voices of my mentors and the law partners within my law firm, I worked hard and earned my place at the table,” Johns said. “Today, the numbers haven’t really changed in terms of minority women who have built successful practices in commercial real estate and finance transactions. As one of my former partners put it recently, ‘LaVon remains a unicorn.'”
Johns is also deeply committed to developing the next generation of law firm professionals. For the past 11 years, she has served as an adjunct professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law where she teaches courses in commercial real estate transactions law. She is the immediate past president of the Illinois Institute for Continuing Legal Education.
In addition, she has mentored countless young lawyers, with a particular focus on opportunities and career development for women lawyers.
“I attribute my success to the fact that from day one, I have owned my career,” Johns said. “I have been blessed with success due to my commitment to excellence, hard work, flexibility, resilience, great mentors (the voices that spoke on my behalf when I wasn’t in the room to speak for myself), meaningful relationships with clients and fantastic family support.”
Outside of work, Johns prefers to spend her time working on community service projects, traveling or spending time with her family and friends.