Market voices: The legal community
Byron Kirkland Managing Partner Smith Anderson
The Raleigh-Durham economy is highly diversified, which is great for businesses like ours. It’s so diverse that we’re not dependent on any particular industry or at risk of the ups and downs that one sector might experience. The businesses and industries that tend to be the strongest here are life sciences, agricultural tech, IT, software, energy, real estate, banking and finance. There are lots of growth areas, which in turn attract other, similar businesses. The Research Triangle Park region also supports an enormous amount of entrepreneurial activity that has helped create an entire ecosystem of activity to keep our business economy stable and thriving.
Our commercial real estate practice has been booming. That may be specific to our region and regions like the Triangle because businesses have learned that there’s an advantage to being in a setting where you can have more office space and a larger square footage per person. In our industry, at law firms in large metropolitan settings like New York, where people are more closely packed together, those employees are still not returning to the office. Our region is attractive because of the inexpensiveness of the land relative to places like New York. In general, our practice areas remain very busy. A good thing regarding the economy is that we did not see a sharp increase in our bankruptcy practice.
Mary Nash Rusher
Leslie Packer
Managing Partner Ellis & Winters LLP
The firm expects the Raleigh office to grow, not because we have to, but because we have this great combination of being in a great place to live and yet offering people the opportunity to work on really sophisticated legal work. Because of the way we work in practice groups across offices, we have people in a wide range of practice areas who can work from the Raleigh office but have practices across the country. We expect that to continue going forward.
Managing Partner, Raleigh McGuireWoods
Our advisory work picked up significantly because we were helping our clients do what we were doing, implementing procedures to enable remote working. On top of that, we were helping them adjust to the new laws that were coming out of Congress: the FFCRA (Family First Coronavirus Response Act), you had paid leave all of a sudden, the unemployment system changed radically, along with the rules, clients having to deal with layoffs, the PPP loans. For about five or six months, there was a monumental shift in how we practiced, at least until litigation came back.
42
| Invest: Raleigh-Durham 2021 | PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
Phil Strach
Managing Shareholder Ogletree Deakins
