NEW YORK CITY-Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund has signed a 15-year lease for 20,000 square feet at 120 Wall St. The organization, which advocates for the civil rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and those with HIV, has consolidated onto one floor--the entire 19^th floor--from the 15^th and 20^th floors in the building.

Lambda Legal was represented by Cassidy Turley senior managing director Nicola Heryet and VP Stephen Bellwood in the deal. Roger Silverstein represented the landlord, Silverstein Properties, in-house. Asking rents in the building are $35 per square foot.

Heryet tells GlobeSt.com she is seeing not-for-profits like Lambda Legal looking to take advantage of a favorable market. “This is a good time for not-for-profits to make real estate deals because rents are low,” she says. “So if they need more space they can justify it because the economic terms are pretty good for them right now.”

In addition to financial incentives, the move for Lambda Legal was positive for other reasons as well. It will get a larger conference room, new construction, an improved pantry area and communal areas that were key, Heryet says, due to how the group functions.

“They operate very much like a law firm--they’ve got a lot of individual offices and they needed communal areas where they could all get together,” she says, adding that the new space includes a terrace overlooking the East River.

The biggest bonus, though, according to Lambda Legal executive director Kevin Cathcart is the space. He tells GlobeSt.com that the group, over the course of 15 years in the building, had simply outgrown its former setup.

“We had a 15 year lease that was about to run out later this fall at 120 Wall St.,” Cathcart says. “We outgrew our original space here just a few years after moving in. For more than 10 years we had our staff split between two floors in the building.” Meetings, between colleagues--Cathcart and deputy director Frances Goldstein, for instance--previously required an elevator ride.

The potential for future growth in the building was important as well. “Certainly our goal as an organization is to continue to grow,” Cathcart says. “Because the work that we do has an enormous amount of unmet need.”