Law Firm Expands in $10M Lease

Steve Bay and Clay Hammerstein of the Downtown office of CBRE represented Quinn Emanuel in the latest expansion, a nine-year, $10-million deal that adds 45,000 sf to the law firm's offices. The 35-story TCW Building is owned by Manufacturers Life Insurance, which was represented in-house by Parker Jones.Quinn Emanuel now has more office space Downtown than all but five other law firms, notes Bay, who points out that the law firm opened its original 30,000-sf office at the TCW Building in 1994. In December 2002, Bay and Hammerstein also represented Quinn Emanuel when it expanded from 80,000 sf to 121,000 sf and extended its lease at the 686,000-sf tower, a deal that was the largest law firm transaction of 2002 in Los Angeles.Quinn Emanuel is a 220-lawyer firm whose clients include, IBM, Avery Dennison, Lockheed Martin, AOL Time Warner, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and DirecTV. The firm's expansion continues a trend that has held out throughout the past several years in Southern California: Law firms have been one of the few tenant groups to expand consistently throughout the region and they have accounted for some of the largest leases in L.A. as well as renewals that have been welcome by Downtown landlords without lots of new tenants moving into the market. In August last year, for example, the law firms of Jones Day and Fulbright & Jaworski signed leases for a combined 226,694 sf at Thomas Properties Group's Arco Plaza in two separate deals valued at about $105 million that ranked among the largest Downtown in some time. In November, the Washington, DC-based law firm of Steptoe & Johnson signed a 10-year, $7.6-million lease renewal for 23,692 sf of space at the 72-story US Bank Center.