FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
McArdle Franco PLLC Receives National Recognition in 2026 Best Law Firms® Rankings, Cementing Its Position as a Leader in Construction and Business Litigation
Award-Winning Coral Gables Firm Earns Tier 2 Designation in Miami for Litigation – Construction; Partners Xavier Franco and Michael Mullavey Honored Individually by Best Lawyers®
CORAL GABLES, FL – McArdle Franco PLLC, a highly regarded Coral Gables business litigation law firm with a national reach, has been selected as a Tier 2 firm in Miami for Litigation – Construction in the prestigious 2026 edition of Best Law Firms®. This distinguished ranking places the firm among an elite class of legal practices in the Miami metropolitan area and serves as a powerful endorsement of its sustained commitment to providing strategic, business-focused legal representation to companies navigating the most complex disputes and transactions in today’s marketplace.
For businesses operating in South Florida’s dynamic and competitive economy, selecting the right legal partner can be the difference between a successful outcome and a costly misstep. The Best Law Firms® ranking provides an independent, data-driven validation that McArdle Franco consistently meets the highest standards of professional excellence—a distinction that clients, peers, and industry leaders alike have come to associate with the firm.
A Rigorous and Respected Evaluation Process
The Best Law Firms® designation carries extraordinary weight in the legal profession because of the thoroughness and integrity of its evaluation methodology. Unlike rankings that rely on self-reported data alone, the Best Law Firms® process incorporates multiple independent streams of assessment. These include detailed client feedback evaluating responsiveness, expertise, and results; confidential peer assessments from attorneys practicing in the same legal disciplines; comprehensive interviews with recognized leaders across relevant industries; and an exhaustive review of each firm’s professional credentials, notable case outcomes, and organizational achievements submitted through a formal research process.
The combination of these evaluative measures produces one of the most reliable and comprehensive guides available to businesses and individuals seeking top-tier legal counsel anywhere in the United States. Earning a Tier 2 ranking within this framework is a significant professional achievement, and for McArdle Franco, it represents the culmination of more than two decades of focused, client-centered practice.
Individual Partner Recognition
Complementing the firm’s institutional honor, two McArdle Franco partners received distinguished individual recognition in 2026, further illustrating the depth and quality of the firm’s legal team.
Xavier Franco was named to The Best Lawyers in America® 2026 for his exceptional work in Litigation – Construction. Over the course of his career, Franco has established himself as one of South Florida’s most skilled and respected construction litigators, known for his ability to manage intricate multi-party disputes and deliver favorable outcomes in cases involving substantial financial exposure. His inclusion in Best Lawyers® reflects not only his technical legal abilities but also the trust and esteem in which he is held by clients and colleagues throughout the region.
Michael Mullavey earned a well-deserved place on the Best Lawyers: Ones to Watch® in America 2026 list for both Commercial Litigation and Litigation – Construction. The Ones to Watch® designation spotlights attorneys who are early in their careers but have already demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and peer recognition. Mullavey’s dual selection across two demanding practice areas signals his rapid ascent as one of the most promising young litigators in the South Florida legal market and reflects the firm’s ongoing investment in cultivating the next generation of legal talent.
A Firm Built on Real-World Business Experience
Since its founding in 2002, McArdle Franco Miami Law Firm has carved out a distinctive identity in the South Florida legal landscape by seamlessly blending sophisticated legal counsel with genuine, hands-on business experience. Unlike many firms where attorneys’ knowledge of commerce is purely academic, McArdle Franco’s lawyers have personally managed large-scale land development projects, overseen private equity and debt portfolios, launched successful web-based service providers, and built thriving companies across multiple sectors of the economy.
This entrepreneurial DNA is woven into the fabric of everything the firm does. It shapes the way attorneys evaluate risk, structure transactions, and advocate for clients in and out of the courtroom. When a McArdle Franco attorney sits across the table from a client, they bring more than legal expertise—they bring the perspective of someone who has faced the same operational pressures, financial uncertainties, and strategic decisions that business owners confront every day. This capacity to understand legal challenges from a businessperson’s vantage point is what enables the firm to consistently deliver the kind of efficient, creative, and smart solutions that have become its hallmark.
Core Practice Areas
McArdle Franco’s capabilities are organized around four deeply interconnected practice areas, each one strengthened by the firm’s unique combination of legal depth and business insight. Below is a detailed look at three of the firm’s cornerstone disciplines that most directly contributed to its 2026 recognition.
Transaction Structuring
McArdle Franco serves as trusted counsel for partnerships, corporations, and entrepreneurial ventures engaged in complex business, commercial, and real estate transactions throughout South Florida and across the nation. Widely recognized as a premier South Miami business transaction structuring practice, the firm brings decades of combined legal experience and sharp business instincts to guide clients through every critical phase of a deal—from preliminary due diligence and initial term sheet negotiations through final documentation, execution, and closing.
The firm’s transactional attorneys handle an exceptionally broad spectrum of matters, including real estate acquisitions and dispositions, construction and development agreements, corporate mergers and acquisitions, debt and equity financing arrangements, government procurement contracts, joint venture and supplier agreements, public-private partnerships, and cross-border commercial transactions involving foreign entities and international regulatory considerations.
What truly distinguishes McArdle Franco’s transactional practice is its disciplined commitment to consequential thinking—a forward-looking analytical framework that focuses on anticipating potential future risks and outcomes to inform present-day decision-making. Rather than simply drafting documents that memorialize the terms currently on the table, the firm’s attorneys proactively identify fault lines in proposed deal structures, rigorously stress-test key contractual provisions against a range of plausible scenarios, and negotiate terms specifically designed to insulate clients from the kinds of ambiguities and oversights that so often become the seeds of costly litigation. This methodology has helped countless clients avoid disputes entirely, preserving business relationships and saving significant time and financial resources in the process.
The firm also recognizes that transaction structuring and business entity formation frequently go hand in hand. When the structure of a deal calls for the creation of new entities or the reorganization of existing ones, the transactional and business structuring teams work in concert to position clients to absorb potential liabilities with minimal impact to their bottom lines.
Business Structuring
McArdle Franco works in close partnership with clients to design and implement corporate frameworks that position their businesses for sustainable growth, operational resilience, and long-term competitive stability. Whether a client is preparing to launch a new venture from the ground up, expanding operations into new geographic or product markets, attracting outside investors, or restructuring an existing organization to improve efficiency and reduce exposure, the firm’s attorneys bring a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the tax, legal, and economic forces that shape the most consequential business decisions.
The team’s core competency lies in creating sophisticated multi-tiered entity structures that effectively shield valuable assets, contain and quarantine potential liabilities, and establish clear pathways for outside investment, strategic partnerships, and favorable market exits. But the firm’s approach to business structuring goes well beyond entity formation paperwork. Every engagement begins with a deep, consultative dive into the client’s specific industry, competitive landscape, risk profile, and long-range strategic objectives. Armed with that understanding, the attorneys develop customized organizational frameworks that comprehensively address liability and litigation risk based on the client’s unique market position, asset preservation through deliberate and strategic segregation, potential tax implications of single-entity versus multi-entity configurations, commercially beneficial exit strategies for founders, owners, and investors, and actionable financing plans to support future growth, acquisitions, and capital raises.
The firm’s senior partners bring an additional layer of insight that is exceedingly rare in the legal profession. As accomplished entrepreneurs who have personally built and grown successful businesses in the construction and real estate sectors, they understand the practical realities of running a company in ways that purely academic legal training cannot replicate. This blend of legal precision and entrepreneurial instinct enables the firm to anticipate challenges that other attorneys might overlook and to structure businesses not just for legal compliance, but for genuine commercial success.
Land Development and Construction
The firm’s land development and construction practice stands at the very heart of McArdle Franco’s professional identity and is the practice area most directly connected to the firm’s 2026 Best Law Firms® recognition. Real estate development transactions are among the most complex undertakings in commercial law, frequently involving multiple layers of equity participation, debt and equity financing, intricate business structuring requirements, evolving land use regulations, and the inherent challenges of managing large-scale construction projects. McArdle Franco is built to handle exactly this kind of complexity.
As a leading South Florida Land Development Law Firm and established South Florida Construction Development Law Firm, the firm represents virtually every stakeholder in the real estate development lifecycle. Clients include real estate developers, property owners, general contractors, subcontractors, architects, engineering firms, commercial tenants, mortgage lenders, and commercial lenders. This breadth of representation across all sides of the industry gives the firm’s attorneys a panoramic understanding of the interests, pressures, and priorities that each party brings to a project—an advantage that proves invaluable at the negotiating table and in the courtroom alike.
The attorneys negotiate and draft the full range of documentation that complex development projects demand, including land development and construction contracts, professional service agreements, surety bonds encompassing bid, performance, and payment obligations, real estate purchase and sale contracts, mortgages and commercial real estate financing agreements, private placement memorandums and capital participation offering memorandums, joint venture and public-private partnership agreements, and commercial leases. Every document is prepared with meticulous attention to the interconnectedness of contractual provisions, ensuring that clients have a clear and thorough understanding of the legal, tax, financial, and practical implications of every material term before they commit.
What truly elevates this practice is the firsthand industry experience of the firm’s senior partners, who have personally conceived, financed, and built successful real estate, construction, and mortgage enterprises from the ground up. This operational knowledge provides clients with strategic insights that extend far beyond the scope of traditional legal counsel—from understanding the practical realities of project timelines, budgeting, and contractor management to recognizing the regulatory, environmental, and financial pitfalls that can derail even the most meticulously planned developments. It is precisely this unique and powerful combination of courtroom skill, transactional sophistication, and deep industry knowledge that earned McArdle Franco its Tier 2 ranking as a Coral Gables construction litigation law firm in the 2026 Best Law Firms® edition.
A Culture of Collaboration and Enduring Client Partnerships
What ultimately distinguishes McArdle Franco from other firms in the South Florida market is a deeply ingrained culture of collaboration that permeates every aspect of the practice. The partners do not operate in silos. Instead, they regularly convene to share insights across practice areas, pressure-test legal theories and strategies from multiple angles, and develop innovative, multi-disciplinary solutions as a unified team. This collaborative model ensures that every client benefits from the collective knowledge and experience of the entire firm, not just the individual attorney assigned to their matter.
When an engagement demands specialized expertise beyond the firm’s core legal disciplines, the attorneys draw on a carefully cultivated network of top-caliber professionals—including accountants, tax advisors, financial consultants, engineers, environmental specialists, and industry experts—to ensure that clients receive the most comprehensive, well-rounded guidance available. This willingness to look beyond the firm’s own walls in service of the client’s best interests is a defining characteristic of the McArdle Franco approach.
The results of this philosophy speak for themselves. The firm has built an extensive portfolio of deep, lasting client relationships—many spanning decades—rooted in mutual trust, complete transparency, and a relentless, unwavering focus on achieving the best possible results. Clients return to McArdle Franco time and again not simply because of the firm’s legal acumen, but because they know their business will be treated with the same level of care, urgency, and strategic rigor regardless of the matter’s size or complexity. It is this enduring foundation of trust and performance that continues to fuel the firm’s growth and its recognition among the nation’s finest legal practices.
Contact Information
McArdle Franco PLLC 255 Alhambra Circle, STE 925 Coral Gables, FL 33134 Phone: (305) 442-2214 Email: info@mcper.com Website: www.mcardlefranco.com
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