KIRKWOOD — Nearly two years after it was displaced by a fire, law firm Coughlin & Gerhart LLP is moving into a new permanent home at the NYSEG building in Kirkwood. Coughlin & Gerhart lost its offices at 19 Chenango St., Binghamton on Dec. 21, 2010, when a fire destroyed the neighboring Midtown Mall building. […]
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KIRKWOOD — Nearly two years after it was displaced by a fire, law firm Coughlin & Gerhart LLP is moving into a new permanent home at the NYSEG building in Kirkwood.
Coughlin & Gerhart lost its offices at 19 Chenango St., Binghamton on Dec. 21, 2010, when a fire destroyed the neighboring Midtown Mall building. While the firm’s building never caught fire, it suffered extensive water damage as firefighters fought the blaze, says Mark Gorgos, managing partner at Coughlin & Gerhart.
For several weeks, the law firm’s employees and attorneys scrambled to work from their homes, their cars, and from borrowed conference rooms until Coughlin & Gerhart eventually landed in about 25,000 square feet of temporary space on the Huron Campus in Endicott. Almost immediately, Gorgos says, the firm began the search for a new permanent home.
“We looked at every option in the greater Binghamton area,” he says. Coughlin & Gerhart worked with The Bell Group of Syracuse to find a new location. While moving to more permanent space at Huron was an option, Gorgos says the firm ultimately decided on the NYSEG building at 99 Corporate Drive, Kirkwood. Gorgos declined to share details of the law firm’s lease agreement with NYSEG (New York State Electric and Gas).
“We’re trying to blend a variety of factors,” Gorgos says in outlining the firm’s requirements. The new offices had to offer client convenience, ample parking, accessibility, IT infrastructure, and the ability to mold open space to fit Coughlin & Gerhart’s needs. The NYSEG facility offered all of that, plus the added benefit of allowing the firm to locate on just one floor.
While it may not seem like a huge factor, Gorgos says the law firm was all on one floor when it was located at 19 Hawley St., Binghamton, and really missed the collaboration that came with that benefit when it moved to Chenango Street, where Coughlin & Gerhart occupied four floors. After the fire, he says, he knew he wanted to regain that collaborative vibe that comes from having all the employees on the same floor.
To further complement that, Gorgos says the 24,000-square-foot office is being outfitted with Wi-Fi hotspots and interdisciplinary rooms, which he dubs “war rooms,” where attorneys can work together collaboratively. The new space will also contain a media room to meet the growing demand for video conferencing both with clients and with courts, he says.
“We’re heavy into the building out right now,” Gorgos says. He anticipates work should wrap up the last week of November, leaving Coughlin & Gerhart free to move into the space the second weekend in December. The contractor on the build out is JRC Contracting Inc.
“There’s no doubt we’re excited about replanting our roots,” he says.
In spite of the disasters the law firm has faced — the fire in 2010 and the widespread flooding that affected much of Broome County in September 2011 — Coughlin & Gerhart has rebounded strongly, Gorgos contends.
“That fire really taught us the need to be resilient and flexible,” he says.
Coughlin & Gerhart is having a strong year this year, Gorgos says. “Every one of our practice groups is doing better than we projected,” he notes. In particular, the firm is seeing a lot of natural-gas work such as lease and pipeline reviews out of its office in Montrose, Pa.
Looking ahead to 2013, Gorgos says there may be one more move on the firm’s horizon as it begins to evaluate its downtown Binghamton office at 105 Court St. Coughlin & Gerhart wants to maintain a downtown presence, he says, but with all the downtown development in recent years, it needs to review all its options.
Coughlin & Gerhart (www.cglawoffices.com) currently employs 93 people, including 43 attorneys. Of those, 85 employees are housed at the Huron Campus and will move to the new Kirkwood office later this year.
Syracuse–based engineering firm O’Brien & Gere also recently relocated its Southern Tier office to the NYSEG Building in Kirkwood from the Huron Campus.
Contact DeLore at tdelore@tgbbj.com