Just ask Mark Frazier, managing partner of Rutan & Tucker LLP in Irvine, who limited the belongings he sent to his firm’s new location to a framed photo of the Angels in the 2002 World Series, some family pictures and a couple boxes of paper files.
Rutan, the second-largest firm as measured by the number of Orange County attorneys, has moved its headquarters from Anton Boulevard in Costa Mesa to newly built space in The Boardwalk on Jamboree Road, with most of the work completed as of last August.
“We didn’t have to move a whole lot of furniture from Anton over to Boardwalk because almost everything is built in,” and the law firm had been putting documents and paper files into a digital format well before the move, Frazier said.
Attorneys and support staff were already working from home due to COVID-19, making the office relocation that much smoother.
“We didn’t have a huge amount to move for anybody in particular,” Frazier told the Business Journal on March 9.
Top Floor
As of February, Rutan had 137 attorneys in Orange County, down from 143 a year ago, and a total headcount of 265 people in OC, according to information compiled by the Business Journal. That put Rutan behind No.1 Knobbe Martens in Irvine with 147 lawyers and 397 people total locally. Rutan also has offices in San Francisco and Palo Alto.
Full-service Rutan’s work includes corporate and tax, employment, government and regulatory, intellectual property, litigation and trial and real estate. Its accolades include a listing among the Best Law Firms in the U.S. News & World Report 2021 rankings.
Rutan occupies the entire top floor at each of the two interconnected nine-story buildings at The Boardwalk complex, as well as some space on the eighth floor of one of the buildings.
The firm has also reduced the amount of room it needs for lawyers and staff. Rutan says it has 77,000 square feet at Boardwalk, about 31% less than it had in Costa Mesa.
Frazier praises the new offices about a mile from John Wayne Airport, as a “collaborative space.”
“The move was not your typical move where you’re picking up all of these materials in one office and trying to move over them to a new office,” he said. “We were only moving over basically incidental things to Boardwalk.”
Like many law firms, Rutan for the most part has done away with its law library, keeping only a small collection of paper resources, trimming things even further.
“We had been going digital for many years. We really ramped up that effort so we wouldn’t have to have a lot of paper storage space at Boardwalk,” said Frazier, who joined Rutan in the trial department straight out of law school in 1982 and made partner in 1990.
New Requests
Despite the pandemic, Frazier said 2020 “turned out actually very well for us in terms of getting people to work from home, in terms of hiring people, in terms of getting things done for our clients and maintaining the financial health of the firm.”
“Our attorneys’ strong work effort allowed us to exceed our initial 2020 projected revenue number,” Frazier said without providing any numbers.
There were some savings on the expense side, for example with less travel.
Frazier said some expenses will come back, while there may be a new mindset about them. He said, for instance, important depositions may take place in person, while lesser ones could still be done in the new-found formats via remote computer.
The pandemic has led to new forms of requests from Rutan’s clients.
“Our clients looked to us for new types of advice that we had not been asked to provide before,” he said, citing pandemic-related issues such as “force majeure” that prevents a company from fulfilling a contract.
He said now there are about 20 to 30 people working in the new offices on any given day since “most people are working from home.”
“When we get back into the office, The Boardwalk is going to be far superior space” compared to its old home in Costa Mesa, Frazier explained.
Lawyers and staff want to work in the new offices but only “when it’s safe to do so.”
