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By Lindsay Suchow Photograph by Garret Lown
For an event with a highly specialized focus, ScheinMedia’s Law & Office Conference on March 11 explored quite a range of topics, from design and architecture to technology and the environment.
Over 100 attendees—contractors, brokers, and real estate attorneys—filled the IDT Building’s Washington Square Conference Center in Newark for a half-day of networking and expert panel discussions on the many facets of law firm tenancy in New Jersey.
“It’s an understatement to say it’s an unusual time in our economy, and to put together this sort of an event, you have to find the right topic,” says ScheinMedia President and CEO Jonathan A. Schein. “We came up with this concept about the law firm as a tenant. Law firms are one of those parts of the industry—whether it’s growing or shrinking or staying the same, they are always active.”
Paul Giannone, managing director at Jones Lang LaSalle, offered a startling preface to the attorney-moderated panels: with an overview of the law firm marketplace in northern and central New Jersey. There, he says, firms comprise 4.5 percent, or 5.5 million square feet, of the region’s 120 million square feet of occupied office space—and that kind of surface area can come at quite a price.
“Law firms tend to lease the most expensive space in our market,” says Giannone, and at approximately 700 square feet per attorney. Bearing these numbers, Giannone calculated the average cost of leased space at about $23,000 per attorney in rent alone. (Improvements, overtime HVAC, and urban parking tack on more than $30,000 more per annum per attorney.) “That’s way more than double the average cost of occupancy for the other industries in the state of New Jersey.”
Nationally, law firms are targeting between 600 and 650 square feet per attorney in an effort to lower operating costs, Giannone says, noting firms should opt for space compression and efficiency rather than relocation.
In fact, the sheer size of law firms and the measures most practices are taking to condense them was a common theme among the first two panels; the Landlord Panel, moderated by Connell Foley partner James Rhatican, echoed Giannone’s penchant for downsizing space.
Michael Allen Seeve, president of Mountain Development Corporation, noted that he has observed neighboring law firms sharing common areas, which “serves the end goal and can be one of the advantages of being a multi-tenanted office building.”
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