Pamela Lakey, SSL Law Firm partner

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As the real estate recovery hobbles along, partners at SSL Law Firm are surprisingly upbeat.

During the worst of the downturn, older San Francisco land use and real estate firms like Cassidy Shimko Dawson Kawakami and Ellman Burke Hoffman Johnson folded and big firms have shed lawyers from their real estate departments. By contrast, the 10-year-old real estate-focused SSL boutique has notched its biggest gains. Five lawyers joined the San Francisco firm from Ellman Burke at the start of 2010. Since then, six more have joined from bigger firms.

With a total of 26 attorneys, SSL has grown into among the biggest real estate groups housed in the Bay Area. “SSL is a counter-trend,” Orrick, Herrington Sutcliffe real estate partner Michael Liever said. “They’ve really carved out a nice niche for themselves.”

The firm boasts marquee public company clients like Apple Inc., Salesforce.com, JPMorgan Chase and Boston Properties, and recently had a hand in big deals like the Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment project and Facebook Inc.’s move to Sun Microsystems Inc.’s old Menlo Park, Calif., campus. The partners acknowledge they don’t draw Big Law paychecks, but say they have a lot more control over their professional and personal lives.

SSL was founded in 2001 by three in-house counsel from Spieker Properties. Sara Steppe was general counsel and Pamela Lakey and Dana Stone were associate GCs. When Spieker merged with Equity Office Properties, the trio opted not to relocate to Chicago, deciding instead to open their own shop: Steppe, Stone Lakey. Equity Office Properties was their first client.

Lakey, whose career trajectory included two years at Steefel, Levitt Weiss and two at Brobeck, Phleger Harrison, said the plan was to build on the firm’s leasing work foundations and become what she calls a full-service real estate firm, handling land use, environmental, bankruptcy and other real estate-related matters. She said she had no idea it would happen so suddenly, though. “We thought we’d gradually hand-select people who worked with our model — business lawyers and deal makers,” said Lakey, who has been co-managing SSL with Sally Shekou since the firm’s early days. “But the change in the Ellman Burke firm turned out to be good fortune for us.”

Though the firm is small, SSL lawyers routinely appear opposite Big Law attorneys. In the Facebook deal announced earlier this year, SSL, led by Lakey and Shekou, represented property manager RREEF. Attorneys from Orrick; Paul, Hastings, Janofsky Walker and others handled various other aspects of the deal. SSL handles commercial leasing for Apple and is starting to handle retail leasing for the company, led by partners Jodi Fedor and Lisa Maxwell.

The firm also has been adding renewable energy clients, with partner Christine Griffith handling matters for NextEra Energy Resources Inc. in the Montezuma II Wind Energy Project in Solano County, for example.

SSL is also one of the largest women-owned firms anywhere. Although Steppe and Stone have retired from the firm, nine of its 11 partners are female.

The firm waited a few years before becoming certified as women-owned. Kyla Chin, who joined the firm from Morrison Foerster, said the partners wanted to get established first. “We didn’t want to be stigmatized by it,” she said. Certification by Astra Women’s Business Alliance in 2005 helped the firm land work from utilities ATT and PGE Co., partners said.

SSL’s exclusive focus on real estate is distinctive, said Shartsis Friese real estate partner David Kremer, who worked opposite the firm on the Facebook deal. “The fact that they have chosen to limit their practice only to real estate is unusual,” he said. “I don’t think that exists anymore.”

Kremer said Bonnie Frank’s and Jeffrey Ebstein’s The Real Estate Law Group in Sausalito follows a similar model, but that firm has only six attorneys. In San Francisco, 26-lawyer Greene Radovsky Maloney Share Hennigh and 35-lawyer Stein Lubin have a strong real estate focus, but handle other matters like securities, tax and business services. The same is true for 50-lawyer Miller Starr Regalia in Walnut Creek.

Kremer said SSL also stands out for the amount of experience each partner has. “Most of their lawyers all had many years of real estate practice under their belt elsewhere before they joined SSL,” he said. “It’s a unique collection of people.”

IN THE SWEET SPOT

Around a conference table in a small 27th floor office at 575 Market St., the partners at SSL — mostly women in their 40s — explain the business and cultural benefits they see in their firm: The sense of ownership, the lack of required office face time and the growing client list of well-known public companies. “You have control over the work you do, whom you do it for, and your hours,” said Fedor, one of the Ellman Burke transplants.

“We’re all in the prime of our careers,” said Griffith, who also joined from Ellman Burke.

“We have the contacts to develop great business opportunities, and the energy and drive to get the best results for our clients. It feels like we’re in that sweet spot.”

Part of their success owes to relatively low billing rates, which have become more of a draw for cost-conscious clients. Partners charge between $300 and $450 an hour. The firm has been attracting new clients — such as California State University, which works with Griffith — and new types of work from existing clients. In addition to the firm’s work for Apple and its retail leasing, JPMorgan Chase is now sending them land entitlement and approval matters, for example.

Partners at the firm bill 1,700 to 1,800 hours a year on average, and often work from home. “Everybody has the capability to work remotely and we don’t babysit that at all,” Lakey said. “And I think that clients like that we’re uber-available.”

The economic downturn also seems to have made SSL more attractive to lateral candidates from bigger firms. “It used to be that big firms were the safe place to be,” said Shekou, who joined SSL from Heller Ehrman in 2002. “When I was leaving Heller a lot of people told me I would be wrecking my career by going to some small, no-name firm.”

Shekou says she’s OK with the fact that she’s not likely to work on a huge corporate merger or an enormous portfolio deal. She joined because she liked the energy of the firm’s young women who were controlling their own destiny. And she hopes the vibe doesn’t change. “We’ve been approached to become a bigger firm’s real estate department,” she said, “but it has never appealed to us because it’s so nice to keep our little group the way it is.”

STEADY GROWTH

The group is less little than it was just two years ago. After Ellman Burke closed, Leslie Browne and Michael Brody first moved to Buchalter Nemer, but changed their minds and came to SSL during the last year. Environmental lawyer Zachary Walton left Paul Hastings in early 2010 to help open the S.F. office of Downey Brand. One year later, he joined SSL. “Larger firms claim to be nimble and responsive to the business needs of their clients, but they are not,” Walton said. “At SSL, we don’t have a bureaucracy that needs to approve your relationships with your clients, giving you the freedom to enter into arrangements that make the most sense for you and your clients.” And he says he isn’t a slave to the billable hour. “I work with two associates and they’re busy, but you don’t have to keep four full-time associates at 2,000 hours each busy,” Walton said.

He also enjoys the absence of management looking over his shoulder, evaluating him. “What you make is based off the work you do. I don’t have an executive committee or a chief administrative officer with a spreadsheet that shows how many hours you billed, and here’s how you ranked against xyz,” said Walton, who estimates he’s on track to bill about 1,700 hours this year.

There are downsides to working at a small firm like SSL, too. One of the biggest limitations is the pay, said Shekou. Though partners make at least $100,000 a year, Shekou says they don’t make anywhere close to what first-year associates make at the most prestigious firms. “You have to be willing to have a trade-off. You don’t see those huge salary draws, but at the same time, you’re not expected to work those kinds of hours,” Shekou said. “I’m at peace with that.”

Another challenge typically faced by small firms is the perception that its lawyers aren’t the same caliber as big-firm attorneys, Shekou said. That’s unfortunate, she said, because most of SSL’s partners have Big Law experience, and SSL is bigger than most big-firm real estate departments. “But still, we’re not a MoFo or an Orrick, and those are tremendously well-established, venerable firms that people respect and know,” Shekou said.

Still, over the past year and a half, SSL has added about 14 lawyers, including a few contract attorneys, Lakey said. “Every time we say we’re done growing and we just want to sit down and do our job, somebody totally amazing crosses our path. You don’t say no to really great lawyers who are going to be great team members.”

Lakey said there’s no desire among her partners to diversify beyond real estate, at least not anytime soon. “Now is the time to sit down and do our jobs really well,” she said. “We’re not intending to become another MoFo.”

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