We love commercial and investment real estate. It’s how our clients get rich slowly. They and we enjoy the journey as much as the destination. We are animated by wanting to know everything about buying, selling, leasing, exchanging, and financing real estate. We enjoy asking our clients intelligent questions, assisting them with their real estate opportunities, and devising creative solutions to their property challenges.
We love family businesses. In the 3000 years since the invention of coinage, people have devised thousands of ways to make a living. We are fascinated by the many ways that our clients provide value to their customers. We have clients in the supply chain who buy at wholesale and sell at retail. We have clients who make or distribute goods, ranging from machines as sophisticated as automobiles to industrial supplies as plain as rocks. (You can do very well if you buy and sell the right rocks.) We have clients who are brokers who connect buyers and sellers, landlords and tenants, and borrowers and lenders. We have clients who, like us, provide professional services.
We love our city’s history. Our founder is a lifelong Portlander and has watched the city develop. What matters today in downtown real estate is in large part because of decisions made 50 years ago. We know the system that brought us here.
We love to plan for the future. Many of our clients have succeeded in business and have invested well. We help them attain peace of mind for their children and their grandchildren. We have known some families for four generations, and we advise them on providing for the fifth and sixth generation. We are lawyers whom you can pass on to your children.
We love the language. We write with clarity. Words are the tools of our craft, the hammers and nails of our carpentry. We write leases that put into words the commitments of our clients that may take 30 years to fulfill. Our words are your promises. We use them carefully. We strive to write to you in plain terms so that our advice is clear and useful to you. How clearly do we write? Click here for one of our engagement letters.
We respect our clients. We don’t charge our clients for many of the incidentals that appear at the end of the invoices of many firms: small copying, ordinary postage, online legal research providers’ fees, and the like. Those costs are part of our overhead. The costs that we do pass through are all invoiced at our cost, without markup. Our clients hire us for our expertise, not for our photocopier.
We know that legal fees are part of your overhead. The dollars that our clients pay lawyers could have funded other investments. We want to help you spend less on legal fees. If we have helped you to spend less on lawyers so that you can invest more elsewhere, then we have done our job well.
