Barry LePatner

Winthrop helped a leading real estate lawyer share his diagnosis of America’s infrastructure problems and his prescription for their cure.

Barry LePatner, the head of a boutique New York law firm, engaged The Winthrop Group to help communicate what he had learned in over 30 years as an advisor on business and legal issues affecting the real estate, design, and construction industries. The resulting book, Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets (University of Chicago Press), sheds light on the causes of excessive cost-overruns in everything from residential home-building and commercial construction to home renovations, citing gross inefficiencies throughout the building process and a lack of reliable information available to all parties. LePatner outlines a series of steps to mitigate this problem, including tougher contracts, background checks, and effective project management.

Building on the commercial success of this book, Winthrop collaborated with LePatner on a second book, Too Big to Fall, dealing with America's looming infrastructure crisis, which was published in 2010.