Following clients to the suburbs

By Robert Loerzel

Throughout Chicago’s history, the city’s most prominent law firms have had offices downtown. That remains true today, but some firms with addresses in the Loop are finding that it also pays to have offices in the suburbs.

“More and more, companies are opening offices in the suburbs, and we thought we should be there, too,” said Byron Myers, chief managing partner of Ice Miller, a law firm based in Indianapolis that opened a Chicago office in 1997, followed by an office in DuPage County in 2004.

After a 2007 expansion, Ice Miller now has 17 lawyers in Lisle, compared with 14 in its downtown Chicago office.

“DuPage County is a business center of exceptional opportunity,” Myers said. “It has a significant population base and a robust business mix of finance, retail, high tech, transportation and manufacturing. These are world-class companies that offer Ice Miller a built-in client base.”

Lawyers at several firms said the best thing about having a suburban office is how convenient it is to spend face-to-face time with suburban clients.

Dean J. Leffelman, a lawyer at Ice Miller’s Lisle office, recalls talking with a new client in DuPage County who had been using a downtown Chicago lawyer.

“What’s he look like?” Leffelman asked.

“We don’t know,” the client responded. “We’ve never seen him.”

As a result, Leffelman said, “I took a nice piece of business away from another law firm that’s downtown.”

Of course, today’s technology makes it possible to communicate instantly and share documents electronically, so lawyers and clients don’t have to sit down together in the same room all the time. But in spite of all those advances, face time is still valuable.

“Technology makes it easier and faster to communicate with our clients,” Myers said. “But we think it’s still very important to meet with our clients.”

Ronald S. Safer, managing partner at Schiff Hardin, agrees.

“Communication is instantaneous wherever you are,” he said. “It’s never been easier to reach out and touch someone. But there will never be something that replaces face-to-face contact.”

With a history going back to 1864, Schiff Hardin has offices in six major cities (Chicago, New York, Washington, Boston, Atlanta and San Francisco) and two offices in locations that don’t seem to match the others - Lake Forest and Wilmette.

The firm opened a small office in Wilmette to handle estate planning and wealth management for North Shore residents.

“For us, it’s all about client service and what is best for the client and most convenient for them,” Safer said.

In 2002, Schiff Hardin added the Lake Forest office, which Jenner & Block originally opened in 1987.

“We could bring to the north suburban area the talents we had developed in the Chicago setting,” said Richard Lee Verkler, a lawyer who’s been at the office ever since Jenner & Block opened it, and is now of counsel at Schiff Hardin.

And clients could get that sort of big-city expertise “without having to traipse downtown,” Verkler said.

He recalled telling his suburban business clients that they could always meet with him at Jenner & Block’s downtown Chicago offices if they wanted to.

“Nobody ever accepted that offer,” Verkler said.

The lawyers at the Lake Forest office left Jenner & Block because they had more business than they could handle, Verkler said. They decided they needed to affiliate with a firm that could help them with more expertise in certain areas of the law, including estate planning and financial services, so they moved over to Schiff Hardin.

“They were a perfect fit for us,” said Verkler, adding that the split with Jenner & Block was amicable.

The Lake Forest lawyers also added depth to Schiff Hardin’s team, bringing their expertise in import-export law, government contracts and complex international business transactions.

For its north suburban clients, Schiff Hardin’s Lake Forest office has all the convenience of a small-town law office.

“It’s closer to the client base,” Safer said. “Everything about it is easier - the traffic, the parking, the logistics.”

But the lawyers in Lake Forest also have a large team of sophisticated attorneys backing them up at offices around the country.

That’s something that a smaller independent law firm in the suburbs can’t provide, said Nicole Finitzo, another lawyer at Schiff Hardin’s Lake Forest office.

“Schiff Hardin can do things that they can’t,” she said.

However, Northwest Suburban Bar Association President Scott Barber said small suburban firms can compete with big Chicago firms.

“We compete with some of these big law firms for bank business,” said Barber, who has a firm, Riffner Barber in Schaumburg, with partner Robert G. Riffner.

Barber has lived and worked in Schaumburg for years, and clients know he’s local, he said.

That’s the sort of hometown aura that the big firms are aiming to acquire when they move into the suburbs, but sometimes clients prefer a local lawyer with a small firm, Barber said. They can be confident that they’ll keep on dealing with the same lawyer for years to come, he said.

“Obviously, there are some cases where a bigger firm would be better able to handle it, because of the manpower,” Barber said. “It’s not a matter of brain power.”

Over five decades, the Northwest Suburban Bar Association has grown from a handful of lawyers to the current roster of 650, although Barber said the number of members has been pretty steady over the past 10 years.

One of the city law firms with a presence in the northwest suburbs is Masuda Funai, which has 45 attorneys in three offices: Chicago, Los Angeles and Schaumburg.

Mary Beth Reuter, Masuda Funai’s director of administration, said the firm expanded into the suburbs with a Rolling Meadows office in 1983, and then moved to a bigger space in nearby Schaumburg five years ago.

Masuda Funai had a simple reason for branching out into the burbs.

“We had a large concentration of clients in the northwest suburbs,” Reuter said. “It’s far more convenient for the clients and for us. It’s a hassle to come downtown.”

Masuda Funai built its practice on representing international companies operating and investing in the United States. In Schaumburg, many of the firm’s clients need legal representation on immigration matters, Reuter said. Some of the clients are companies bringing employees here from other countries. Others are individuals who need help with visas or work permits.

The Schaumburg office of Masuda Funai has eight lawyers, compared with the 30 at the firm’s downtown Chicago office. Nearly every day, lawyers from the Schaumburg office spend some time at the Chicago office, Reuter said. They may need to be downtown for a court appearance, or they may need to meet with someone at the Chicago office.

Lawyers from the Chicago office also stop in frequently at the Schaumburg location, Reuter said.

Those sorts of back-and-forth office visits are typical at law firms with offices in both Chicago and the suburbs.

For Arnstein & Lehr, its municipal business led it to open an office in Hoffman Estates.

The law firm represents several municipalities in the northwest suburbs, including North Barrington, Volo, and Hoffman Estates, so it’s natural to have an office not too far from those village halls, said Arthur L. Janura Jr., chairman of Arnstein & Lehr’s local government group.

“There is great benefit in having some offices close to the people you’re dealing with,” said Janura, who served as a Cook County Circuit Court judge from 1984 to 2007. “Depending on how traffic is, it becomes very difficult to travel back and forth.”

In addition to working out of the Hoffman Estates office, Janura has an office at Hoffman Estates Village Hall, and he is frequently at Arnstein & Lehr’s downtown Chicago offices.

Technology makes it easier for him to take his work with him as he goes from office to office. He can sign into Arnstein & Lehr’s computer network and access the same files - wherever he is. But no matter how easy communication is now, Janura agrees that face time with clients is a key factor in being successful.

“It’s really client-driven: Where are your clients and where is your work?” he said. “A lot of times, clients still want to see you and you want to see them.”

Some Chicago law firms have opened offices in a few suburbs, strategically covering various parts of the Chicago area.

Cassiday Schade, a firm with 80 lawyers in Chicago, now has eight in Naperville, nine in Libertyville and three in Rockford.

“When the firm started in 1979 with the Chicago office, most of the suburbs were very provincial and there wasn’t much in the way of litigation being filed in them,” said Marc F. Benjoya, a member of Cassiday Schade’s executive committee. But that soon began to change.

About half of Cassiday Schade’s clients are physicians and hospitals, and the firm also represents many architects and engineers.

“They migrated from Chicago out to the suburbs,” Benjoya said. “We decided to move with them.”

The first step was opening an office in Wheaton in 1984.

“We picked DuPage County as our test market,” Benjoya said. “That office was an instant success, both with our clients and the judges.”

Before opening that office, Cassiday Schade faced a problem whenever its attorneys did business at the DuPage County courthouse.

“The local lawyers were more familiar with the judges,” Benjoya said. “The judges seemed to respond more favorably to the local lawyers.”

After Cassiday Schade established a presence in Wheaton, its lawyers came to be seen as “locals,” too. The Wheaton office has since moved to Naperville.

The firm also opened an office in Waukegan, later moving it to Libertyville, which was closer to most of Cassiday Schade’s Lake County clients.

Several years ago, Cassiday Schade opened an office in Rockford, giving the firm an even wider reach.

Benjoya said, in his opinion, Rockford has a fairly small number of local lawyers, which gives Cassiday Schade many opportunities to pick up new clients. And the lawyers in the Rockford office also do work in DeKalb, LaSalle and Peoria.

“It gave us a huge circumference,” Benjoya said, making Cassiday Schade more of a regional law firm.

Benjoya, who works out of the Libertyville office, said it’s important to have a regular presence in the courtrooms of the collar counties, since those counties use a system in which the same judges usually stay assigned to a case from the beginning to end.

“It was very important that judges see the same face,” Benjoya said. “And you’re able to establish credibility and standing in the community. It gave our clients the big-firm sophistication, technology and resources that small firms don’t have the resources to provide, with a small-town presence.”

Thomas R. Hill, managing member of Dykema, would agree with Benjoya about the importance of having a local presence in the collar counties.

Lawyers who drive from Chicago out to the courthouses in DuPage and Will counties won’t have the same knowledge as a local lawyer will about the area’s jury pool. It helps a great deal, Hill said, “if you live and work in the community where the pool of juries is drawn from.”

Dykema has nearly 450 attorneys at offices in Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles and Washington. Five years ago, the firm merged with Rooks Pitts, acquiring that firm’s office in Lisle. The office has about a dozen lawyers.

Dykema’s Lisle office handles a lot of patent cases, which Hill said is a complex area of the law, and Dykema’s clients benefit from having a big firm’s resources.

“You get that benefit by coming down the street to our office,” Hill said.

Querrey & Harrow has had suburban offices since the 1980s. The firm has 75 attorneys in its Chicago office, four to five in Joliet, four in Wheaton, four in Merrillville, Ind., and one full-time lawyer and one part-time lawyer in Waukegan.

“It might sound hokey, but we really do think it’s good to be part of the community,” said Michael B. Stillman, managing shareholder with Querrey & Harrow. “Clients like it better when they know you’re there and you’re part of the community.”

A major part of Querrey & Harrow’s work for years has been representing State Farm Insurance Co. Whenever those cases come up in the collar counties, it helps that the firm’s lawyers have offices near the courthouses, Stillman said.

“As the growth of the suburbs occurred, and more people moved out there, we had more cases out there,” he said.

“If we were going to do a lot of work in the county and the courthouse there, it’s better to be in the county. There’s not as much windshield time.”

In recent years, Querrey & Harrow has expanded its work beyond insurance defense, taking on clients such as Joliet-area hospitals and Indiana casinos.

“In order to practice in Indiana, you have to have an office in Indiana,” Stillman said, explaining the firm’s decision to open a Merrillville location. “We view ourselves as being a northern Illinois and northwest Indiana regional law firm.”

Querrey & Harrow used to have offices in Crystal Lake and Kane County, but it closed those locations when technology made them seem unnecessary, Stillman said.

Another law firm that’s questioning the need for a brick-and-mortar presence in the suburbs is SmithAmundsen, which spun off from Querrey & Harrow in 1997. Three years ago, SmithAmundsen combined its Geneva and Wheaton offices into a new St. Charles location.

The firm also has offices in Rockford and Woodstock, but it closed a Waukegan office this fall, converting it into a new “virtual” office.

“It’s an experiment,” said Larry A. Schechtman, partner-in-charge at SmithAmundsen’s Chicago office. “We’re finding ways to keep the costs and overhead down.”

Thanks to e-mail and video conferencing, he said, “There’s not as much need for that face-to-face time, which translates into less need for bricks and mortar.”

The three lawyers who used to work at SmithAmundsen’s Waukegan office now work from their homes in Lake County, and they also stop in regularly at the firm’s Chicago and Milwaukee offices. And they can meet with clients at a shared office space that SmithAmundsen has in Deerfield. Their mail goes to the Chicago office, where it’s scanned and e-mailed to the lawyers.

“It’s a cost savings that will be passed onto the clients,” Schechtman said. “We could potentially do this at other offices.”

The key thing for Schechtman is that the lawyers in Lake County will still be close to their clients if they need to meet in person.

“The people will be there,” he said. “We continue to see a need for a local presence in the business community.”

It remains to be seen whether other law firms will follow SmithAmundsen’s lead, using “virtual” offices, or follow the trend of other law firms, opening branches around the suburban area.

With the Daley Center, the Dirksen Federal Building and numerous law offices, downtown Chicago continues to dominate the region’s legal community, but the suburbs are playing an important role, too.

“Obviously, Chicago is the hub,” said Stillman, of Querrey & Harrow. “Chicago is still the center of the legal universe for all firms here, but we do have to have our roots in other places.”