Deep roots, cheaper rates and attention to the staff are a good start

By RICHARD ACELLO

In some respects, being a San Diego headquartered law firm is like being a local restaurant or bank. The locals may appreciate your ties to the community, but the service itself also may be available from a bigfoot competitor who can afford to buy into the business. Yet the law is a little different; sometimes local matters.

Increasingly complex land use decisions require input and approval from local agencies. If engaged in expensive litigation here, it would be advisable to have a lawyer extraordinarily familiar with the tendencies of local judges and juries.

Still, in a globalized economy, San Diego’s local law firms can face pressure to grow larger so they can handle complex cases with clients half a world away. Going it alone can require a massive investment in attorneys, real estate, support staff and machinery. A merger may solve the growth problem, but create new ones including shared decision making as the firm grows further from the founders’ principles.

Leaning on local smarts, networking, branching into other markets and charging less than the Big Guys are among the strategies being employed to survive, and thrive.

Leaning on its roots is Luce Forward Hamilton & Scripps, the city’s oldest firm, dating back to 1873, and largest, with about 140 lawyers in three San Diego metro locations and another 80 around the state. “We are a San Diego-centric firm with a California strategy,” says Dennis Doucette, manager of Luce’s Del Mar Office.

Founder Moses Luce was a Civil War Medal of Honor veteran who came out to San Diego and helped write the City Charter. “Over that time, we served on all of the major boards, and parts of the community fabric, and that’s a lot of our clients,” Doucette says. “As new businesses opened up and came, it’s become more competitive, but our San Diego connection has served us well.” The firm is involved in a long list of local causes, including the Opera, the Symphony, and Legal Aid Society.

Competitive pricing also is part of the Luce strategy — “We don’t have international overhead or cost structures, so for entrepreneurs we can be very affordable,” says Doucette — as is letting associates work more on cases. “A lot of my junior associates get to work directly with clients,” says Doucette.

Expertise in local land use is a big help. “Despite consolidation, some aspects of the law truly are local, as in land use, where you need approval from a city or county, that’s local, and you want local lawyers for that,” says Doucette. “For litigation, you’d like the lawyers to know the judges. But there certainly is a challenge to locals as firms go global, and that’s why we affiliate with networks of providers.”

Keys To Competing

As managing partner of Procopio, Cory, Hargreaves & Savitch, the second largest local firm with north of 100 attorneys, Tom Turner knows well the out-of-town competition. “There’s a huge group of regional and national firms working aggressively to take over clients and top legal talent,” he says. The keys to competing, Turner says, are a combination of value — lower billing rates and more sensible staffing priorities — and a firm culture that encourages long stays which increases profitability. “Those things become self perpetuating, so then you build the client base, which increases profitability, so you can get further involved in the community and build your culture, and so on.”

Procopio specializes in corporate, real estate, bankruptcy, tax and litigation, for brand names such as Kyocera, Qualcomm, and Sony. General counsels typically can’t handle all of the detailed and varied assignments thrown their way, and typically farm out some of the work to local firms. “We have a client who said they’d be sending us their M&A (mergers and acquisitions) work on small deals of less than $200 million,” Turner says. “We’ll take those ‘small’ deals.”

With its 60-year history in San Diego, Procopio is heavily involved in civic activities, including the San Diego Senior Center, La Jolla Music Society, the Monarch School, Biocom and Connect.

“One of the differences between us and others is, how the economy goes here, goes Procopio,” says Jim Perkins, the firm’s COO. “So it’s very important to us that the San Diego community continues to grow — we don’t have some other city supporting us.”

With about two dozen lawyers, Duckor Spradling Metzger & Wynne can’t afford inefficiencies. It recently closed a Palm Desert office to bring back a valuable health care partner to San Diego.

Duckor Spradling represents doctors, labs, and managed care companies as part of its broader business practice. Managing partner Gary Spradling says the firm wins with a strategy that emphasizes service, value and results. “We don’t load it up with eight lawyers on a team, and we charge less by a couple hundred an hour than a large law firm.”

Among other civic involvements, partner Scott Metzger just finished up a term as president of the Coronado Rotary.

Although transactional business may be down everywhere, litigation tends to increase during down times. “We’re not any less busy,” says Spradling. “Litigation tends to crank up because people don’t have resources to meet their commitments; were still busy, but sometimes clients don’t have the ability to pay, so we have to be careful and not get over-extended.”

For lawyers looking for that small firm feeling, Duckor beckons. No need to worry about being part of the anonymous herd; in fact, bonding would be a requirement in a 22-lawyer office. “With the smaller firm either you get along, or you have to get out,” Spradling says, laughing. “We have to care about the people, because talent isn’t a commodity — we go for the idea that we want them here for the long time.”