Biglaw

A Look At Boies Schiller's Brand New Offices In New York's Hottest New Neighborhood

Hudson Yards quickly becoming the go-to location for attorneys.

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Less than a week after moving into its new offices, Boies Schiller & Flexner are still trying to get accustomed to a radical shift in law firm layout. Partners with interior offices? Flex-use space as far as the eye can see? High-tech boards guiding visitors around the halls? It’s a lot for a firm to adjust to. But perhaps the biggest point of adjustment is to the location of the office itself.

For the generations of aspiring New York attorneys who traipsed from Penn Station across 11th Avenue to the cavernous halls of the Javits Center to take the bar exam, the trek to the hinterlands of West Manhattan was a rite of passage. Transportation was useless, there wasn’t a decent lunch place for blocks, and the nearby trainyard felt eerily like a rejected Fallout map. There had been a plan to develop the area by moving the NY Jets here, but officials decided the place was already dreary enough.

If that describes the last pilgrimage you made to the Hudson Yards area, it may be time to take another look. Despite botching the opening in typical Cuomo administration fashion, the 7 Train now drops passengers off in the heart of the neighborhood. Amenities are trickling into the area with more set to open in the coming months. You can even hop a helicopter to the airport.

While the area is still heavily under construction, with multiple high-rise offices in the early stages, Boies Schiller & Flexner has already made the area its new home.

Unlike those of us who saw the area as a wasteland for years, BSF embraced the vision of what it could be. The firm committed to making Hudson Yards its new home in 2015, long before there was much to suggest what the area would become. But the firm that began its life as David Boies and Associates working out of Armonk, NY to become an uber-prestigious Am Law 100 litigation firm with 15 offices across the country and in London couldn’t be accused of a lack of vision. Partner Philip Korologos, told me that when BSF signed on as the first tenant in 55 Hudson Yards they held their breath for a minute but that their vision has paid off as tenants have flocked to the new development, with 55 Hudson Yards fully leased with other buildings still being built. By the middle of next month, the area will celebrate its grand opening with restaurants, retail, and the curious landmark known as The Vessel all opening to the public.

Soon, they’ll be joined in their Westside haunt by both Cooley LLP, leaving the Grace Building, and Milbank, decamping from the Wall Street environs its occupied for 150 years. Skadden is already planning to make the move next year. And now rumors swirl that Debevoise will soon follow. The firms will join a plethora of financial entities calling the new development home. In fact, the neighborhood is seeing the largest influx of tenant square footage and the financial sector is leading the way. Some are even suggesting that the new development will be a callback to a bygone era when Biglaw and its biggest clients rubbed shoulders in the narrow caverns of Wall Street.

David Boies definitely shares this vision. He describes Hudson Yards as the first opportunity to recapture the spirit of the old Wall Street where lawyers and their clients could work in close proximity and meet up to discuss the case (or just network) without having to lose half a day at the whim of crosstown traffic.

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The firm’s offices — designed by Schiller Projects — open into a main reception area with views of midtown Manhattan and a sweeping staircase connecting the additional offices above and the cafeteria below.

Sadly, these are all my pictures taken by me with a mere iPhone, but hopefully they can convey a sliver of what these offices look like.

Overhead, a grand sculpture of beaded cables droops and flows throughout the atrium. The striking piece visually connects the entryway to the office space above.

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The cafeteria downstairs includes a staffed coffee bar for anyone looking for a pick-me-up as well as a ton of open space for chatting with colleagues over a bite and some futuristic chairs to hop into in case of a mid-meal call that can shield your conversation from the bustle of the rest of the firm’s lunch.

Before we get too far into this tour, looking for your way around? Every floor is decked out with an interactive touch screen that allows you to look up attorneys to find a map to their office or to book one of the firm’s ample conference rooms — helpfully shown below as either open or booked. If you’re looking for Boies himself, he’s in the southwest corner in a glass office with walls that frost over on command.

The formal conference rooms are joined by a gaggle of lounges, small corner cubbyholes, and a “library” (without books) that aren’t for booking as much affording attorneys flexible spaces to work unchained to their desk. The firm massively invested in these unassigned workspaces, building so many that on the firm’s busiest day of meetings… there would be conference space left over. Following a trend we’ve seen at other firms, many of these workspaces occupy the desirable corner office space once reserved for partners:

Meanwhile, the partners — with the exception of Boies and Schiller, who maintain large corner offices suitable for large work sessions — have migrated to the interior offices. These internal offices resemble the White & Case offices, but instead of paired up associates, these house partners. As Boies explained, BSF has always prided itself on being an “associate forward firm” as seen in their potentially super lucrative compensation structure. But moving the partners inside while giving associates and paralegals exterior views reflects this focus in design as well. Rather than potentially snap something confidential, you can see some partner offices from this shot taken within yet another of the firm’s conference rooms.

Which brings us to the controversial aspect of the new firm layout. Associates may have exterior offices, but they are also arranged in carrels of four, equipped with high-end adjustable sit/stand desks. For an associate used to having an office alone with a door that closes, this will definitely be a culture shock. But the goal is to encourage more collaborative work, nudging attorneys to spend more time in one of the high-tech conference rooms, projecting their laptop upon a big screen with the push of a button and reviewing documents or discussing opposing filings in a group. In time, the associates will learn their favorite side room or lounge space to work from when they want to grab a bit of privacy — from the right perspective, it’s like picking your own office. It’s fitting that one of the rooms is called the library because even though it lacks books, it’s reminiscent of your favorite law library nook that you toiled in most of your 1L year. Personally, there was a glass seating area only slightly bigger than a closet looking out over the Hudson River that I would absolutely commandeer as my private refuge when I needed to make a call or get away from it all.

Checking in today, three weeks removed from my office visit, Korologos told me that he sits across from a small workroom and that he’s seen exponential growth in the room’s usage as the days have gone by.

Still, it’s an adjustment. But it’s one that attorneys are going to be faced with more and more as real estate prices climb and folks find themselves out of the office (whether for travel or telecommuting) more and more. The giant, private office is increasingly falling out of favor and how attorneys build the future office to be an inviting workspace within these new constraints will rest on the sort of natural integration of communal and unassigned private spaces that BSF’s design has done.

To the point that every attorney is going to find their favorite little office space to work from, Boies showed me his favorite “home away from home” side room, an informal lounge on the Northeast corner of the building looking out upon the grand concourse of 11th Avenue to the north and the Midtown skyline to the east.

It’s probably a cheap device to try and connect a firm’s new office to their recent transition plans. “A new office portends a firm moving on to the next generation” or something like that. And I’m certainly not above the cheap, hokey rhetorical device from time to time. The problem is, it’s not really accurate here. To try and tie those together would be to suggest that Boies and Schiller aren’t as active today as they’ve been at any time in the firm’s relatively young life. But the firm’s leadership transition speaks as much to the eagerness of the named partners to get back to the business of lawyering by passing the administrative baton. And maybe that’s the rhetorical tie-in, if we must have one: BSF’s new offices, like its leadership transition, are all about challenging conventional wisdom. Shouldn’t the name on the door be running the business-side of the firm? Shouldn’t the lawyers have corner offices?

BSF doesn’t have time for conventional wisdom. They’ve got lawyering to do.

Earlier: Another Biglaw Firm Moving To Hudson Yards
The Hot New Location For Biglaw?
David Boies Dishes On Firm’s Transition Strategy

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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