Feldman Joseph: A California Law Association Formed by Two Legal Industry Veterans
- Jonathan D. Joseph
- Jan 7
- 4 min read
Updated: Jan 11
Media Contact:
Feldman Joseph
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Feldman Joseph: A California Law Association
Formed by Two Legal Industry Veterans
SANTA MONICA, CA -- January 7, 2026. When attorneys Jonathan D. Joseph and Lewis G. Feldman announced they were launching their new boutique law association, Feldman Joseph, the reaction in California legal and finance circles was less surprise and more recognition: this was an inevitable collision of distinguished careers that had been orbiting each other for decades.
The two first practiced together as partners at Pillsbury Madison & Sutro in the early 2000s, developing a shared approach to law that blended institutional-grade legal precision and expertise with commercial fluency and capital-markets pragmatism. That philosophy, refined over more than 90 collective years of practice, now forms the foundation of their new Santa Monica-based boutique — a firm engineered to operate at the intersection of M&A, banking and credit union regulation, fintech payments and e-commerce, corporate governance and white-collar investigations, commercial transactions and infrastructure-intensive real-estate finance.
Lew Feldman: Public Finance and Real Estate Strategist
Feldman’s career reads like a roadmap of California’s consequential real estate and structured-finance evolution. A former Managing Partner and co-founder of Goodwin Procter’s California offices, Feldman led the firm’s Los Angeles operations during its formative years and helped shape its West Coast market strategy.
Beyond private practice, Feldman has served since 2009 as Chairman of the UCLA Richard S. Ziman Center for Real Estate at UCLA Anderson School of Management, one of the nation’s most influential real-estate policy and research institutions. His legacy includes advising on entitlements, infrastructure reimbursement, Community Facilities District (CFD) financing, and tax-exempt bond strategy for large-scale mixed-use development across California.
A fixture in legal rankings, in addition to an AV®+Preeminent ranking, Feldman has been recognized by Best Lawyers (Tier 1), The Daily Journal (Top 100 Lawyers in California; Top 500 U.S. Lawyers), Lawdragon (Top 500 U.S. Lawyers), and Legal 500, underscoring his reputation for strategic regulatory judgment, public-private finance structuring, and legal creativity.
Jon Joseph: Architect of $35B+ in Financial-Institution Deals and Commercial Transactions
Joseph built his name on both sides of the negotiating table: as a regulatory-fluent corporate, banking industry, transactional and venture capital lawyer, and as a trusted corporate advisor to boards, investors, and financial institutions navigating existential change and growth. He is ranked AV®+Preeminent by Martindale-Hubbell and is a member of the California State Bar and the New York State Bar.
Joseph has been a partner at two AmLaw 50 law firms: In 1990, he became a partner in the Corporate Securities and Financial Institutions Group of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro (now Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP) and spent the next 13 years representing numerous publicly held banks, bank holding companies and other financial institutions and investment banks in connection with mergers, underwritten and private offerings, corporate governance, bank regulatory and enforcement and similar matters. In 1995-96, he co-founded Pillsbury’s first east coast office in New York City, where he represented a global investment banking and securities firm to create one of the earliest commercial loan securitization platforms in the world. Following his tenure at Pillsbury Law, Mr. Joseph joined K&L Gates LLP (then known as Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham LLP) where he was a partner in their Corporate and Investment Management Group.
In 2006, Joseph founded and then built the California law firm - now known as Joseph, Cohen & Del Vecchio, PC (JCD) and previously as Joseph & Cohen - a San Francisco based banking, credit-union and financial services boutique he scaled into a highly regarded firm over two decades, advising on M&A, corporate governance and fiduciary duties, depository institution regulatory and enforcement matters, litigation, fintech, e-commerce, money-transmission and large scale commercial contract transactions with counterparties that included many of the most prominent financial services providers in the country. He also served two separate stints on the California Financial Institutions Committee, a standing committee of the California State Bar’s Business Law Section for 10 years and served as the Committee’s appointed Chair (2013–2014).
Joseph departed JCD at the end of 2025 to co-found Feldman Joseph with Lew Feldman, driven by a belief that the market no longer needed bigger firms — it needed smarter, tighter, cohesive, specialized ones that apply technology, experience and professional judgment to yield desired and desirable client solutions and outcomes.
The Firm’s Core Thesis: Big-Firm IQ, Boutique Execution
Rather than competing on breadth, Feldman Joseph competes on depth. The firm’s model centers on:
Board-level advisory and governance strategy
Banking and credit-union transactional, regulatory and enforcement representation
FinTech payments, e-commerce and money-transmitter structuring
Infrastructure, municipal-bond, CFD and tax-exempt finance strategy
PropTech and emerging-growth corporate transactions
Land-use entitlements that secure public reimbursement and long-term project value
It is a firm designed not for legal volume, but legal consequence.
What Makes Feldman Joseph Distinct
Combined experience advising $100B+ in structured finance and institutional transactions
Fluency in banking and capital markets, including bank, bank holding company and credit union transactions, regulation + infrastructure-intensive real-estate finance
20+ year founder/operator perspective scaling a major CA financial-institutions boutique (Joseph)
UCLA institutional policy leadership in real-estate finance and infrastructure reimbursement (Feldman)
Market credibility anchored by client testimonials, peer review, and formal industry recognition
Feldman Joseph enters a California business landscape in 2026 where financial institutions are consolidating driven by federal deregulation, fintech regulation and partnering with depository institutions is accelerating, and real estate developers are underwriting infrastructure risk at unprecedented scale. Strategic vision and wisdom are paramount in this environment. The firm is positioning itself as a deal centric, regulatory-fluent, capital-markets literate, infrastructure-finance-capable legal shop built for institutions, boards, investors and innovators that can’t afford trial-and-error legal advice.
Feldman Joseph welcomes inquiries via info@FeldmanJoseph.com.
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