Erika Shinpaugh represents investors, developers, landlords, tenants, and lenders in complex real estate and finance transactions throughout the United States. With more than a decade of experience spanning both private practice and senior in-house leadership roles, she provides strategic, business-focused counsel that helps clients achieve commercial objectives while effectively managing legal risk.
Erika’s background includes serving as both outside counsel to clients and an in-house legal executive for one of the nation’s leading real estate investment and development companies. This dual perspective gives her a practical understanding of how sophisticated organizations evaluate opportunities, allocate capital, and make business decisions. Clients value her ability to balance legal considerations with business realities and deliver pragmatic, results-oriented solutions. Over the course of her career, she has advised on more than 1,000 commercial real estate, leasing, and financing transactions involving a broad range of asset classes, ownership structures, and capital arrangements.
Her practice encompasses acquisitions and dispositions, joint ventures, commercial leasing, real estate development, financing transactions, and asset management matters. She regularly advises clients on transaction structuring, due diligence, title and survey matters, land use and entitlement issues, construction-related considerations, and the negotiation of complex transaction documents.
Erika also has extensive experience representing both landlords and tenants in sophisticated leasing matters, including headquarters leases, portfolio leasing programs, and other strategic occupancy arrangements. Her experience spans office, industrial, retail, multifamily, hospitality, agricultural, data center, renewable energy, and mixed-use assets.
Prior to joining Stokes Lawrence, Erika served as Vice President and Senior Counsel for the Office Division of The Irvine Company, one of the nation’s largest privately held real estate investment and development companies. In that role, she served as lead counsel for a premier office portfolio comprising more than 17 million square feet of Class A and trophy office assets and represented the landlord in more than 1,000 office leasing transactions throughout California.
