Peter Van Schaack opened a law office on Cedar Street in New York City. His prospects for success were outstanding. A top graduate of King’s College, a former clerk of one of the most prominent lawyers of the day, and with the aid of retainers from Peter Silvester and his in-laws, he quickly developed a successful practice focusing on probate, debt collection, and disputed land titles. Kinderhook was embroiled in boundary disputes and Peter was called on to litigate several of them. Maxwell Bloomfield has noted that he developed the belief that “the insecurity of property rights in real estate transactions posed as great a threat to the welfare of the province as any of England’s tax measures.”