Seth Goettelman

I practice real estate, business and M&A, and fund formation law on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Most of my work involves someone buying, building, financing, or selling something — property, a company, or an interest in either.

I started at a large Midwestern firm, Quarles & Brady, and then moved in-house — first with a national hospitality company, Hyatt, and later with a charitable foundation and its investment affiliate, where I worked with founders and closely held businesses. That mix matters more than it sounds. Firm practice teaches you to produce the document. In-house teaches you to live with it — and to notice which provisions actually get argued about three years later.

I also spent several years presenting no-obligation educational sessions for a national business insurer’s clients, on business succession and estate planning — what belongs in a plan, and how an owner gets a company ready to sell. Explaining this work to a room of people who are not lawyers is a good discipline. It is hard to hide behind language when your audience will simply stop listening.

Why Southwest Florida, and why now

I live on Fort Myers Beach. That is not a marketing position; it is where my house is, and it shapes what I see. This island and the coast around it are in the middle of a rebuilding that will take years, and a great deal of it turns on questions I find genuinely interesting: who is putting up the capital, how that capital is structured, what the law now permits to be built, and who ends up owning the result.

Changes to Florida law — the Live Local Act in particular — have made those questions more consequential in the last two years than they were in the ten before. A practice sitting at the intersection of real estate, business transactions, and securities is a useful thing to have here right now.

How I work

Fixed fees, quoted in writing before the work starts. You will leave a first meeting with a menu of prices for what you actually need, and for the scope we agree on, that price holds. I spent enough years receiving legal bills to know what the alternative feels like.

Fixed fees cover legal services. Third-party costs — filing and recording fees, title charges, taxes, and similar expenses — are separate, and are identified in writing before the work begins. A fixed price assumes the scope we agree on; if the scope changes, we agree the change in writing first.

I am a solo practitioner, which means the person you meet is the person doing the work. It also means I am honest about capacity and about scope. When something is outside what I do, I will say so early and tell you who is better suited.