Albert J.
Santoro

Albert J. Santoro came to the law by way of the ledger. Trained as an accountant at New York University before earning his J.D. at Brooklyn Law School, he built his practice on a habit most lawyers never acquire: reading the numbers himself. It is a habit that has shaped three decades of guiding clients through conflict — as advocate, strategist, forensic accountant, business advisor, and crisis manager — in and out of courtrooms across New York and beyond.

Admitted to the New York bar in 1997, Mr. Santoro began his career in Brooklyn, where he authored the Kings County District Attorney’s training manual on the prosecution of vehicular offenses and handled more than a thousand criminal matters for the People — an education in how cases are built that he has spent the decades since turning to the defense, representing hundreds more clients from street-level charges to homicide, white-collar, and tax matters, alongside a substantial practice in commercial, construction, matrimonial, and entertainment litigation.

Clients know him in two registers. At the negotiating table he is deliberate and exacting: most disputes end in a room, not a courtroom, and he treats negotiation as advocacy of the highest order. At trial he is something else entirely. The firm's name is not an accident.

Mr. Santoro is admitted in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania; before the United States District Courts for the Southern, Eastern, Northern, and Western Districts of New York, the District of Columbia, the District of Colorado, the Central and Southern Districts of Illinois, the District of New Mexico, and the Eastern District of Texas; before the United States Tax Court; before the United States Courts of Appeals for the Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, D.C., and Federal Circuits; and to practice before the Internal Revenue Service. He serves on the Criminal Advocacy Committee of the New York City Bar Association and consults with clients in English, French, and Russian.