Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher used to call Page Mill Road its Bay Area home; the firm opened its office there in 1979. But in October, Gibson Dunn moved to a mixed use retail/commercial building in downtown Palo Alto, trading its former office park digs for a location down the block from Starbucks, across the street from a Keen hiking boots shop and a three block walk from the town’s Caltrain high speed rail stop.
In 40 minutes, a lawyer leaving the new office can be at home in San Francisco, no matter how many Teslas crawl along U.S. 101 at rush hour.
“With younger lawyers, but frankly with everybody, coming into office parks—what Page Mill Road is—it’s big, there are no restaurants, no food, no coffee, no anything. Just giant office buildings with office parks surrounding them, literally nothing walkable,” said Michael Celio, a litigator who serves as partner in charge of Gibson Dunn’s Palo Alto office.
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After also looking at Redwood City and Mountain View, the firm settled on a former J.P. Morgan Chase location at 310 University Avenue in Palo Alto. “Stanford is four blocks away, the train station is at 1 University Avenue, and this is the highest density of restaurants and coffee shops—we have four on our block,” Celio said. “We also noticed our client base—especially my client base in venture capital—is really starting to move here. Three or four clients are now our neighbors.”
As for the office itself, Gibson Dunn took the building “down to the studs,” removing the old bank’s trading floor and interior walls in favor of glass walls and an open floor plan. “There really isn’t a single office where you can shut yourself away from the world,” Celio said. “It creates a culture where we acknowledge each other’s presence, and even a modest interaction is vastly superior.”
The layout also challenges the traditional, hierarchical law firm floor plan. While Celio conceded that his office is slightly larger than others—something the architects did unprompted, he said—the offices are all mostly the same size. And no one “owns” an office permanently. Instead, offices are available to be “leased,” either on a daily basis, a multi-month basis or a long-term lease. Lawyers who come in every day take out longer-term leases on offices, while more-mobile attorneys reserve for shorter periods.
Standing desks, snacks and coffee, and plug-and-play conference rooms with views of the foothills behind Stanford complete the new space, which had its soft opening in October. All told, the firm downsized from more than 30,000 sq. ft. in its former office park to just over 20,000 sq. ft. in the new space, all while increasing lawyer count from 40 in 2020 to 47 at present.
With the arrival of first-years in the fall, the office will hold 60 lawyers by 2025. The space could comfortably seat 75 or 80 lawyers, Celio said, and the firm could take more space in the same building or look across the street if necessary.