Law firm joins Pearl Migration

Chairman Jonathan Ater said the firm chose the Pearl District for a more creative, but still upscale, work space. It leaves its more traditional Class A offices on the KOIN Center's 18th floor to take the ninth floor of Unico Properties' new office tower, the Lovejoy. The firm will move when the building at Northwest 13th Avenue and Lovejoy Street is finished in December.

The move shows how the Pearl has grown into a white-collar destination and how technology has allowed lawyers to push their offices a bit farther from the courthouse. "What we're doing is selling creativity and innovation," Ater said. "This space will help us to that."

With construction cranes spinning overhead, Ater said, Lovejoy Street looks like Portland's new Main Street. "It can be said that the Pearl is the new downtown," he said.

The Pearl used to be a massive railyard where no one in a white collar hung out during the day.

With city help starting in the 1990s, developer Homer Williams started to turn the former railyard into a new district of condos, apartments, shops and restaurants.

The Pearl's first generation was more like a bedroom community than a new swath of downtown. Developers rode the renewed popularity of big city living with thousands of new condos and apartments. But few notable employers moved that far north.

People connected the Pearl with shopping and funky work spaces that catered to design firms. Wieden+Kennedy and Ziba design were among the best known Pearl district employers, said David Squire, managing director at Grubb & Ellis and an office broker since 1990.

The Pearl's reputation started to shift a bit in 2003.

Law firm Perkins Coie was the first big firm to jump past West Burnside Street when it moved into a Brewery Blocks office building.

Now, there's Ater Wynne.

Brian Pearce, Unico's general manager in Portland, said the firm's move validates the Pearl District as a Class A office destination. He thinks Ater Wynne's move will prompt still more to follow.

Ater Wynne has been in the KOIN Center since it opened in the mid-1980s. It grew to 100 attorneys in the 1990s and now has 37.

It will downsize from 40,000 square feet in the KOIN Center to about 27,000 square feet in the Lovejoy. It signed an 11-year lease.

Ater Wynne will take the top floor, far above a ground-floor Safeway.

Its offices will meld the more staid features of a typical law firm with the creative, free-flowing space that the Pearl is known for. The firm will have 30 skylights, 10-foot-tall warehouse-type windows and a terrace complete with a fireplace.

Ater said the firm will have smaller private offices for its lawyers and fancier meeting spaces. He said that's because lawyers don't meet clients in their office anymore. They use offices to chat with co-workers and meet clients elsewhere.

And how can a big downtown law firm be so far away from the courthouse?

"The truth is," Ater said, "you go to the courthouse electronically."

Ryan Frank: 503-221-8519; ryanfrank@news.oregonian.com; blog.oregonlive.com/frontporch.