Legal Landmarks Guided Tours

Explore the legal capital of the world with an expert guide, native New Yorker, and former Big Law summer associate

Professional New Yorker offers law firms a bespoke and best-in-class experience for summer programs, attorneys, and clients

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White Shoe law firms

Designed with a firsthand understanding of life as a lawyer, Professional New Yorker tours always deliver the excellence, creativity, and client focus that elite law firms expect

Top Tours

Explore our most popular routes — custom tailored for Law Firms

Downtown’s Law & Disorder

Follow in the footsteps of Lower Manhattan’s lawmakers and law breakers

From the Founding Father’s constitutional debates to the Five Families’ RICO prosecutions, the winding streets of downtown New York have always been center stage for America’s greatest legal dramas — both on and off the screen.

For four centuries, Lower Manhattan’s lawyers have been leading players in establishing our nation’s core legal traditions.

Fortunately for these hardworking attorneys, they’ve been kept in business by the city’s equally resourceful criminals, who also break new ground while breaking the law.

Head downtown and explore:

  • Visit the birthplace of the Bill of Rights and the gravesite of New York’s first bar-prep guru

  • Gawk at the skyscraper New Yorkers hated so much they created the city’s first zoning code

  • Marvel at how a single overlooked clause in a corporate charter gave New York its most prominent bank and its most infamous slum

Distance👞: ~3,000 Steps

Art Law at the Met

Justice may be blind, but the Met has more than meets the eye

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the preeminent art museum in the western hemisphere thanks to the ambition and drive of some of Gilded Age New York’s leading lawyers (and their art-loving clients).

Nearly as astounding as the art on display are the stories of how the museum came to own its myriad masterpieces — and the scandalous instances when the Met has had to give them back.

In the Met’s magnificent galleries, chart the connections between works of art that are separated by centuries and continents but united by genius, beauty, and property law.

Ascend the Met’s iconic steps and discover:

  • How a bout of appendicitis turned an aspiring lawyer into one of the 20th century’s greatest painters

  • Why a United Nations Convention opened the Met’s most beloved gallery before a class action lawsuit renamed it

  • How Kim Kardashian helped the Manhattan District Attorney recover a priceless masterpiece

Distance👞: ~3,000 Steps

The Hidden History of Hudson Yards

Unearth the secrets of New York’s newest neighborhood

A city within a city, Hudson Yards is the largest private real estate development in the history of the United States. With half of the 28 acre site currently completed, it has roughly as much real estate as all of Downtown Phoenix.

Built atop the last great undeveloped parcel of Manhattan island, its ultramodern buildings house elite law firms, corporate headquarters, high rise condos, cultural institutions, destination shopping and Michelin star restaurants.

Underneath that gleaming newness lies a centuries of fascinating history: metropolitan growth, Olympian plans that never made it off the drawing board, and the ingenious legal wrangling that made Hudson Yards a reality.

Above the West Side Yards we’ll discover:

  • Colossal feats of architecture and engineering that created the 20th century rail yards and the 21st century neighborhood floating above it

  • What the current state of Hudson Yards can tell us about living, working, and building in post-COVID New York

  • How and why private and public forces joined forces to create the Hudson Yards we see today rather than the many doomed alternatives

Distance👞: ~3,000 Steps

You know how to

“think like a lawyer”

We’ll show how to

think like a New Yorker

Professional New Yorker tours are always:

  • Custom tailored for your firm — no two tours are the same!

  • Totally private for your group

  • Engaging & edifying for all audiences

  • Built around your schedule

  • Customizable to your level of accessibility

Get In Touch

Meet your guide: Sam Furnival

A native New Yorker and lifelong learner, Sam Furnival has always been mesmerized by this magnificent metropolis. He is a proud graduate of NYC public schools, Wesleyan University, and Harvard Law School.

At Harvard, he graduated with honors, lampooned the law school as a writer for the HLS Parody and helped a renowned professor design a new course from scratch. He summered at the New York City Law Department and at the New York and Rome offices of a top law firm.

Following a federal clerkship, Sam left the practice of law after realizing that his favorite part of the workday was his walk to and from the office.¹

Sam’s tours delight and fascinate first time visitors and lifelong residents alike. He is recognized as a “Starred Guide” by the City of New York for his exceptional score on the sightseeing guide examination (147 out of 150).

¹ Lawyers also tended to delete his best footnote jokes so he needed to find a more amenable forum for his humorous asides.