Andrew Lieb, MPH, Esq.

THE STORY BEHIND MY PRACTICE

How I Became a Complex Litigator

Entrepreneurship Before Law

From childhood, I lived the exact kind of legal problems I would spend my career litigating. First, in high school, I started a tutoring service that grew to 12 independent contractors. I then went to Indiana University and studied at the Kelley School of Business. While at Kelley, I had a side business renting apartments to college students. I stayed at Indiana for my master’s in public health, where I learned about statutes, regulations, and human behavior.

Learning Law Through Litigation

Next, during law school, I worked at both my uncle’s and father’s law practices, where I developed case management software before its time. After I was admitted to practice as an attorney, I handled a broad caseload at my father’s general practice firm. I found that I liked deep dives into difficult facts and nuanced law. I liked legal puzzles.

Building a Complex Litigation Practice

Pivoting from my father’s firm, I founded a licensed real estate school and began teaching compliance to real estate brokers and salespersons. I built an online, on-demand school that has educated more than 10,000 students in New York. As the school grew, I was also developing Lieb at Law, P.C. The school became an engine for the firm’s growth. General counsels of major real estate brokerage companies began retaining Lieb at Law, initially for real estate and brokerage disputes. As those relationships developed, the scope of our litigation practice expanded into commercial disputes, employment and independent contractor matters, ownership and compensation fights, regulatory proceedings, and cases where several areas of law collided.

Over time, Lieb at Law evolved into a litigation boutique. We handle complex disputes in state and federal courts, before various arbitration providers, administrative agencies, and other forums. Our practice expanded beyond Long Island to the rest of New York and into New Jersey, Connecticut, and Colorado. Our attorneys have appeared pro hac vice in substantial matters around the country.

Making Complexity Understandable

Along the way, I published hundreds of articles in legal journals and taught countless CLEs to attorneys. Then reporters started calling me. When a new law, regulation, or court decision came out, outlets including The New York Times and Business Insider, as well as local and national news stations, would reach out because they needed someone to interpret what had happened and explain what it actually meant.

That eventually led to a period when I worked extensively as a legal analyst, making hundreds of television appearances.

Finding the Pattern

Then I became chairman of a new proptech startup while continuing to litigate at Lieb at Law. There, I raised capital and dealt firsthand with state securities laws and SEC compliance, investor and ownership relations, governance, and how each stage of growth can change a company’s organization. Eventually, I sold my shares in the startup and decided the timing was right to redefine my legal practice.

I had come full circle, working through nearly every aspect of entrepreneurship, and finally heard the music of what was missing in litigation practice.

Tying my experiences together, I created Napkin Litigation™.

Napkin Litigation is a legal field that systematically addresses real and valuable disputes where the documentation, governance, employment structures, or other legal protections are piecemeal, incomplete, or have failed to keep pace with the relationship or value at stake. The litigator has to reconstruct what actually happened, establish the parties’ legal and economic rights, build leverage, and protect the value at stake.

Our team at Lieb at Law has developed a framework to litigate these cases, and we have started training lawyers nationwide on this framework through an 18-part CLE series with Lawline.