Whitney Chen

Whitney Chen is a Senior Associate in the Real Estate practice. She concentrates on commercial leasing, retail development, and mixed-use project financing. Her day-to-day work is drafting and negotiating — ground leases, anchor-tenant leases, lender and mezzanine documents, and the amendments that follow when a project's timeline slips and the rent commencement date moves with it. She represents both owner-side and tenant-side clients, which she has said helps on either side of a negotiation because she knows exactly what the other side's outside counsel has been told to fight over. Chen earned her J.D. from Boston University School of Law in 2015 and her B.A. from Cornell University in 2012. Before joining Oak, Elm & Birch in 2019, she spent four years as transactional counsel at a national retail developer, where she handled a portfolio of over sixty leases across New England and the mid-Atlantic. She was promoted to Senior Associate in 2023. Within the firm, Chen runs the Real Estate group's leasing practice and supervises two of the group's paralegals on leasing-file administration. She collaborates with the Corporate group on the occasional sale-leaseback transaction and with the Tax practice on structuring credit-tenant-lease financings. ## Representative Matters - Tenant-side lead for a national specialty grocer in a 42,000-square-foot anchor lease in a mixed-use redevelopment in West Hartford, including lease negotiation and coordination with the landlord's construction-loan lender, closed October 2023. - Represented a Hartford-based owner in the restructuring of a retail-center leasing portfolio following the loss of a national anchor, including negotiation of replacement anchor and cotenancy provisions across fourteen in-line leases, 2022–2023. - Assisted on the financing side of a 340-unit mixed-use waterfront project in New London (lead: Wallace Blackwood), including construction-loan closing and tenant-side lease review for the first three retail tenants, 2023. - Represented a regional medical-office-building developer in a 22,000-square-foot lease to a Hartford HealthCare affiliate, including negotiation of a build-to-suit workletter and early-occupancy provisions, 2024. Chen is admitted in Connecticut and Massachusetts. She serves as co-chair of the CBA Real Property Section's Leasing Subcommittee and is a member of the International Council of Shopping Centers.