NEW YORK CITY-As large blocks of class A space continue to be in short supply, the law firm Duval & Stachenfeld has signed on for 50,000 square feet in the Coates Building at 555 Madison Ave. for a lease that begins in 2013. Eric Menkes, a partner in the real estate group at the firm who handled the deal, tells GlobeSt.com that the firm “made a forward bet on the market.”

That bet represents the desire that many law firms have in the current market to lock in leases before rents rise precipitously. Stuart Eisenkraft, a CB Richard Ellis vice chairman, told GlobeSt.com recently not all would make it. “Some of those law firms obviously are not going to catch the market at its lowest,” he said. “Maybe they’ll be 20% above the trough, the inflection point. Large block space, which is what these law firms are looking for, is at a premium.”

Menkes says that the firm’s current landlord at 101 Park Ave. seemed more interested in waiting for another, larger, tenant to come along. “He did not seem especially interested in negotiating the lease with us now,” Menkes says. “We understand why--we are part of a block of larger space, and my expectation is that the landlord is going to try to land the big fish first and that’s fine. We came to the conclusion that we’d likely be leaving the space and we tried to find a landlord who’d be willing to speak to us at this point in the game.”

In addition to Menkes, a team from Studley represented the firm in the deal. They were Paul Revson, Zev Holzman and Zachary Reiner. Cushman & Wakefield represented the landlord, the Rodney Corp. The team from Cushman & Wakefield was made up of Robert Baraf, Mark Mandell and Ethan Silverstein.

Baraf, who helped rep the landlord for Cushman & Wakefield, says that the rush for space is intensifying. “There’s not a lot of spaces of these sizes around,” he says. “If you’re going to be in the market then you need to be looking now.” He adds that the space the firm will occupy is currently empty--left vacant when Tiffany & Co., which was subletting it from Sony, left for 200 Fifth Ave.