Firm Leaving Its Iconic Location to Keep Up with Demands on Practice

Moving On

Michigan Lawyers Weekly

By Carol Lundberg
November 24, 2008

Sam Bernstein's million-dollar question is whether he'll be able to sell his building for the exact price he paid for it 20 years ago.

To be more accurate, the asking price is $1.1 million, and Bernstein isn't holding out hope that it will sell before his firm, The Law Offices of Samuel Bernstein, moves one mile up Northwestern Highway to its new office space.

A personal-injury lawyer who has advertised his way into celebrity status in Southeast Michigan, Bernstein would rather stay at his current office in Farmington Hills.

It's highly visible, and he owns it. Its style, that of a Tudor home, is so recognizable on the busy highway that it has become a defining element of the family law firm.

"This is absolutely the worst time to sell," he said, "but we need more space. We can't stay where we are."

He loves his building, for its character and for the memories he has built there. But as he stood in the middle of the construction project that will create his new headquarters, amid the drywall dust and the loose nails and wood scraps on the floor, he said he is excited about the upcoming move.

He pointed out where his new office will be when the construction dust clears, and where offices for his sons and daughter, also attorneys, will be. He waved in the direction of the location of the firm's fastest growing practice, its civil rights pro bono department.

He shrugged and smiled.

"It's a new beginning," Bernstein, 65, said.

The firm's 50-member staff can no longer keep up with the workload and has to hire more people. But there's nowhere to put more desks in the 7,200-square-foot Tudor. As it is, the Tudor is short about five offices and has had to make do with cubicle work spaces for some of the lawyers.

Mark Bernstein, the older of the two sons, said he's the only attorney in the firm with an office big enough for a table.

"It's not that we're taking on so many more cases, and it's not that we're celebrating and popping champagne corks because we're so busy," Mark Bernstein said. "It's because tort law requires that the amount of work we do for every case has doubled or tripled."

The firm urgently needs more paralegals and administrative staff members to keep up with the demands on personal injury practice, Mark Bernstein said. Specifically, he cites the pressure created by two Michigan Supreme Court decisions: Kreiner v. Fischer, and Cameron v. Auto Club Insurance Association.

In the former, the decision added volume to the Bernstein attorneys' workload because the upshot of the decision is that plaintiffs injured in car crashes must produce more evidence to show how the crashes affected their general ability to lead their normal lives.

And, Cameron truncated the firm's deadlines to sue for pain and suffering damages. In Cameron, the court held the No-Fault Act's one-year-back rule, which limits no-fault damages to the one year preceding the filing of a lawsuit, was not subject to the minority/insanity tolling statute.

Though both have affected the Bernstein practice, Kreiner has accounted for 85 percent to 90 percent of the increased workload, Mark Bernstein said.

"No-fault insurance cases have become more complicated and full of obstacles and hurdles that didn't used to exist," he said. "The whole point is that we're in a new environment here and need to have offices that meet the challenges of that environment. It's not that we're growing because we're getting all this new work. It's that we have to do twice as much work to make the same amount of money we used to."

At the same time, the firm's pro bono department, led by Bernstein's younger son Richard, is growing fast and needs more space to accommodate support staff members.

To accommodate its growing staff inside the Tudor headquarters, the firm divided the large conference room in half five years ago, and moved work stations into one of the halves. Two years ago, the firm moved employees into the remaining conference room.

The Bernsteins were forced into a difficult decision, and ultimately decided to move to leased space in the Oakland Commerce Bank building at the southwest corner of Northwestern Highway and Middlebelt Road.

The building itself, modern and bright white with large windows and a marble and chrome stairwell, stands in contrast to the Bernstein's current office.

The firm will more than double the space it has now, and the Bernsteins negotiated for exterior signs on the building, in hopes of maintaining some of the visibility the firm has enjoyed in its current location.

The move also gets the firm out of the business of owning and operating a building, Mark Bernstein added.

"Our business is the practice of law, not of owning real estate," he said.

Mark Bernstein asserts that the move is not the result of a sluggish economy, and said the firm's revenues are steady. He doesn't disclose the number of cases the firm takes in a year, but says the number has not fallen off. He also declined to disclose the lease rate at the new office.

"It's a very emotional move for a lot of us," he said. "I remember moving my dad's office here, and now my son is going to remember this move when we leave this office. There's a lot of sentimental attachment to this office. People have made their careers here, but a lot of us have also made a life here."