In Memoriam: Milton Schwartz 1931 – 2026, father and mentor to our founding partner

Milton Schwartz 1931 – 2026

It is with a mix of a heavy heart and deep gratitude for his lifetime of steadfast love, wise counsel, and generosity, that I share that my beloved father and mentor, Milton Schwartz, passed away on Saturday, July 25, surrounded by family.
My father helped build an international practice around Latin American and comparative law, and was, for many years, a senior partner of Grant, Herrmann, Schwartz & Klinger LLP, the firm where I was also a partner for years before founding Schwartz LLC. He advised domestic and international clients on cross-border commercial and financial matters at a time when relatively few American practitioners had substantial familiarity with Latin American legal systems. In doing so, he helped make Latin American law a serious field of practice for American firms.
The son of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire and Romania, he was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from Brooklyn College and then traveled by train to Mexico, where he studied at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 1951. There he became fluent in Spanish, setting him on a professional, and still more importantly personal, course toward Latin America. He served in the U.S. Army before earning his Bachelor of Laws from New York University School of Law in 1955 and, subsequently, a Master of Laws in 1960 from the same institution.
He built his practice at Grant, Herrmann, Schwartz & Klinger LLP, the New York firm founded on Wall Street in 1946 by his NYU law school professor, David E. Grant, a pioneer in Latin American law, and Albert Herrmann. He counseled a domestic and international clientele on cross-border commercial and financial matters. His scholarship and counsel were particularly influential in the field of Latin American law, where he addressed subjects including the duties of directors and the rights of shareholders.
For decades, he also taught law as an adjunct professor of comparative and foreign law at New York University School of Law. He also taught at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and lectured at the Practising Law Institute.
He advised business leaders, families and figures in the performing arts, and retired after serving for decades as managing partner of his firm. He also held leadership positions as president of the American Foreign Law Association, chairman of the Inter-American Law Committee of the American Bar Association Section of Business Law, chairman of the Inter-American Bar Association, president of the Ecuadorean-American Association, and president and director of the Mex-Am Cultural Foundation, where he was instrumental in the creation of the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York. He supported the Icla da Silva Foundation and the Spanish Institute.
In lieu of flowers, we appreciate any donations made in his memory to an educational institution of the donor’s choice or to NYU Law School (212-998-6400), to support study by foreign lawyers at NYU Law.

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