We’ve Moved!
After 30 Years, Lerch Early has a New Home
After 30 years at 3 Bethesda Metro Center, our firm moved in June to 7600 Wisconsin Avenue in downtown Bethesda. What a change it has been! Only our phone numbers and email addresses are the same. We ran out of expansion room at Bethesda Metro Center, and elected to move to a newer, LEED Gold certified building for our next era.
As you can see in this newsletter, we’ve also freshened our logo and revamped our website. With great assistance from a talented, well-known website design and branding firm, Greenfield|Belser|Finn Partners, our new image better reflects the contemporary character of our new offices. Interviews with clients and employees renewed a common thread among our varied practices – we help our clients rise to every challenge, be they in business, real estate, litigation, or life.
Our new space occupies the 7th and 8th floors of Bethesda Place II, located at the northwest corner of Wisconsin Avenue and Commerce Lane. For those intimately familiar with local landmarks, it is across Wisconsin Avenue from the Claire Dratch store, and at the rear of La Madeleine along Old Georgetown Road.
Metro is only a block away, as is historic “Five Points” – where (until 1984) Wisconsin Avenue, Old Georgetown Road, East-West Highway, and Edgemoor Lane intersected. In 2022, Marriott will move its corporate headquarters to the other end of the same block!
Bethesda Place II is owned and operated by prominent local developers (and clients), Polinger Company and The Tower Companies. It was built in the mid-1990s after the success of Bethesda Place I at 7700 Wisconsin Avenue, the original headquarters for Discovery Communications. It has ample garage parking accessed from Commerce Lane (a short block between Wisconsin Avenue and Old Georgetown Road).
We signed our lease for 40,000 SF over two full floors in February 2016, with brokerage services from JLL. Our architectural design is by Gensler, an international architectural firm whose Washington, DC office has worked for many prestigious law firms. Our premier general contractor, Hitt Contracting, started work in February 2017 and finished the work on schedule and on budget. Our design process was participatory; many employees made valuable suggestions that were incorporated into our plans.
The office design is contemporary, with lots of glass, natural light, and informal collaboration space. Our considerable investment in leasehold improvements, furniture, and equipment will create more operational efficiencies and facilitate the firm’s succession planning to help ensure enduring success for its future generations of attorneys and staff. We now have the ability to host more meetings and functions on-site.
The process of packing and moving was, as you can imagine, both tumultuous and cathartic! We threw away (literally) tons of excess paper, and digitized as many of our records as feasible. We are already reaping the positive psychological benefits of the move – energy derived from new surroundings, renewed collaborations within the office from proximate work spaces and informal gathering spaces, the excitement of meeting new building neighbors and nearby retailers, etc.
Come see for yourself – visit us online at the new www.lerchearly.com and contact your favorite Lerch Early attorney for a tour of our new space!
Land use attorney Robby Brewer serves as Lerch Early’s board chair. He skillfully guides major regional developers, institutional owners, and retailers through the critical phases of expanding, developing, buying, and selling real property in Montgomery County, Maryland and surrounding jurisdictions.
