A law office’s planned move to a 50-story Loop office tower continues a market trend of minimized workplace sizes.
Arnstein & Lehr prepares to move next year to about 65,000 square feet at 161 N. Clark St., stated Managing Partner Michael Gesas. Arnstein & Lehr presently leases about 100,000 square feet at 120 S. Riverside Plaza in the West Loop, the company’s house because 1990, Gesas said.
The majority of the area Arnstein is taking at 161 N. Clark will be subleased from Polsinelli. That law practice plans to relocate February to a 53-story firm tower in the late phases of building and construction at 150 N. Riverside Plaza along the Chicago River.
Arnstein & Lehr is following a law market trend of cutting costs by minimizing realty. Lots of companies are approaching smaller specific offices and eliminating libraries and records that can now be kept digitally.
” We chose to make the relocation due to the fact that we’re in space that, for the purposes of our firm, is old,” Gesas said. “The plus is we will not have the oversized equity partner workplaces that we have here (at 120 S. Riverside).
” My firm is like a castle. It’s ludicrous.”
About 60,000 square feet will be subleased from Polsinelli on the 42nd, 43rd and 46th floorings. Arnstein & Lehr also will lease about 5,000 square feet directly from the proprietor on the 13th floor for the company’s management firms, Gesas stated.
161 N. Clark is owned by a venture of CBRE Global Investors, which bought it in on behalf of a group of South Korean financiers for about $331.3 million in October 2013. The tower has to do with 96 percent rented, according to real estate data provider CoStar Group.
The Polsinelli lease that Arnstein & Lehr is presuming runs till October 2027, Gesas said.
Arnstein & Lehr was represented in the deal by Costs Rogers, a handling director at Jones Lang LaSalle.
Polsinelli is among several firms moving their Chicago workplaces to smaller spaces in towers now under construction. Others include McDermott Will & Emery, DLA Piper and Hinshaw & Culbertson.
Other firms are changing from one existing structure to another to redesign their offices in less overall space, such as Seyfarth Shaw’s offer to move to Willis Tower from the Citadel Center.
Total downtown office job reached a 15-year low throughout the 2nd quarter, however pending moves by tenants from existing structures to new building are anticipated to drive up vacancy in the next number of years.
Founded in 1893, Arnstein & Lehr has about 90 attorneys in the Chicago firm and about 60 in Florida, where it has offices in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach and Boca Raton, Gesas stated. The company also has a small Springfield workplace that its Chicago lawyers use when traveling to the state capital.
Arnstein & Lehr plans to complete the relocation from the West Loop by next April, Gesas said.
Aside from some minor cosmetic modifications such as brand-new carpet and paint, the Polsinelli space is furnished and move-in prepared, Gesas said. Workplaces are 225 square feet for partners and 150 for partners.
Its current area has partner offices from 235 to 310 square feet and associate workplaces of 150 feet, the company said. In spite of the overall reduction in space, the brand-new workplace consists of space for brand-new hires, Gesas said.