Blau & Blau Attorneys, LLC

A law firm that keeps its own real estate appraisers on the payroll is an unusual arrangement, and that is the fact worth leading with here. Blau & Blau runs an in-house consulting group, Blau Appraisal Company and Blau Real Estate, staffed with appraisers and a licensed broker, and it maintains a large computerized database of comparable sales and leases that feeds straight into its cases. Most firms working this area rent that expertise from outside valuers. This Springfield, New Jersey practice built it into the building.

The scope is deliberately tight. Everything here circles one question, what a commercial property is genuinely worth, and who owes what once that number is settled.

The client on the other side of the desk is almost always a commercial property owner: someone contesting a tax bill, or someone whose land a public agency wants to take.

Valuation law from two directions

Blau & Blau files its entire practice under valuation law, and in daily work that splits into two lines that pull in opposite directions. Both turn on an appraisal figure. One side argues it down, the other argues it up, and the same evidence base supports each.

Property tax appeals

New Jersey property tax appeals are the first line and the bread and butter. When a commercial owner believes an assessment is inflated, the appraisal appeal is the mechanism to challenge it, and this is where the internal database pays for itself, because comparable sales and leases are the evidence that moves an assessor or the tax court. The News section points to a reverse tax appeal story covered by NJBiz, and cites a matter where an assessment was cut by $78 million.

The firm also states it can now take on out-of-state property tax work, which stretches the practice past the New Jersey line, a meaningful reach for a firm the size of Blau & Blau.

Eminent domain and condemnation

Eminent domain is the second line. These are the condemnation cases where a government body takes private land and owes fair compensation for it, so the argument runs in reverse, pushing the payout up instead of the bill down.

Among the results the site lists is a $5.05 million payout. The skill set overlaps almost entirely with the tax appeals, the appraisal group backs both, and that shared machinery is the efficiency the whole firm is organized around.

The people and the paper trail

Five attorneys carry Blau & Blau: Robert Blau, Charles Blau, Daniel Kanoff, Eileen Toll, and Thomas Blau. The firm claims more than two decades concentrated on real estate valuation, and that concentration is the pitch. A general practitioner who takes the occasional tax appeal is a different proposition from a practice that does little else.

There is a press trail too. Robert Blau and Charles Blau have reportedly appeared on CNN and been cited in the New Jersey Law Journal and the Star-Ledger, which is more coverage than a small suburban firm usually collects. The Blau & Blau website organizes all of this plainly: separate pages for About Us, the attorney bios under Our Firm, the two service lines, a News feed, a Resources section, and a Site Map to catch the rest. Nothing about the layout is showy, and finding a given page took no effort.

The in-house appraisal arm

Blau Appraisal Company and Blau Real Estate sit under the same roof as the lawyers, with appraisers and a broker on hand, and that combination is the real edge for Blau & Blau.

A valuation dispute is won or lost on numbers, so keeping the people who produce those numbers in-house, next to a searchable record of comparable sales and leases, shortens the distance between the legal argument and the proof beneath it. I can see why an owner staring down a seven-figure assessment would find that setup reassuring.

Outside proof, or the lack of it

Independent reviews are harder to come by. A search for outside coverage of Blau & Blau turns up nothing substantial: no star ratings, no client counts worth quoting. A Lawyers.com profile for the firm exists, but it shows only the generic Martindale-Hubbell language about how ratings are calculated, not an actual score. Other Blau results in search, a BBB entry in Oklahoma City, a Super Lawyers listing, an Avvo profile, belong to unrelated people and firms that happen to share the surname, so they say nothing about this business.

Contact is easier to pin down. A phone number sits up front on the site and a Contact tab is in the main menu, so reaching the office takes no effort. The street address is the holdout, absent from the homepage text, though a business directory listing places Blau & Blau in Springfield. Call that a transparency gap for a practice that otherwise documents its wins in detail.

So the verdict settles in the middle. The specialization is genuine and unusually deep, the case figures the site cites are specific enough to check, and the appraisal arm is a real advantage for anyone fighting a valuation number. What is missing is corroboration: no outside reviews to back the record, and an address you have to source elsewhere. For the right property problem, Blau & Blau reads as a serious option, provided the prospective client is prepared to vet its record by phone, because the open web will not do that job for them.

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