Prof. Charles Altman has many years of experience  in legal positions in financial institutions including MetLife, Prudential, Meryll Lynch, Lehman Brothers and UBS.  He served at the FDIC in regard to bank closings and the sale of distressed assets. Prof. Altman has worked with state insurance regulators regarding insolvent insurance companies. 

Mr. Altman’s expertise includes the integration of legal process flow with financial underwriting, securitization disclosure, and risk mitigation.   He learned FORTRAN at New York’s Stuyvesant High School and as Assistant General Counsel at an insurance company led a team that acquired a computer start-up company from Dartmouth College.  Altman was the founder of TIKON Mortgage Technologies and is the Co-inventor of a business method patent  (US – 6,366,892) for the negotiation of complex legal documentation. 

Prof. Altman also has significant real estate transactional experience in foreclosures, receivership, workouts and distressed debt sales.  He organized a highly successful FDIC auction program that sold 300 NYC co-op apartments to their rent controlled tenants at below market valuations.  He has represented numerous commercial mortgage borrowers with hundreds of millions of dollars of non-performing loans.

Prof. Altman teaches real estate transactions and real estate workouts at Cardozo.  He is currently focused on a cooperative teaching endeavor with a Cardozo partner Law School in the EU.  Prof. Altman also teaches in the graduate finance program at the NYU Schack Real Estate Institute. He has been a visiting or guest professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture and the N.Y.U. School of Law.

Charles Altman was a founding member of the Editorial Board of CMBS World Magazine. Prof. Altman served as a Chair of the Real Estate Transactions Section of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS).  He is very active in the Structured Finance Committee of the New York City Bar Association and organized a program for law school professors (2019). Prof. Altman has presented or moderated at AALS Annual Meetings on European Union Cross Border Real Estate Transactions, (2021) and the development of a new nomenclature to increase life safety in residential structures by recharacterizing certain "illegal" occupany to "PeriLegal" occupany (2023).