Displaced by fire, law firm remains without quarters
CHAMPAIGN – Guy Hall said he feels a bit like the cobbler in the proverb whose children had holes in their shoes while his customers had wonderful footwear.
For the last year, he and his partners have been trying to focus first on the needs of the clients of their firm and secondly on finding a new space.
Hall is a partner in Dobbins, Fraker, Tennant, Joy & Perlstein, a century-old law firm whose building at 215 N. Neil St., just south of the Metropolitan Building, had to be demolished in the wake of the fire.
They learned of its structural unsoundness a month after the blaze, having operated for the first month after the fire under the assumption they could renovate and get back in.
"It was not our desire to watch the wrecking ball take that building down," he said.
A year later, they're still looking for permanent quarters. They would like to stay downtown but finding a space to accommodate 16 people – eight lawyers and eight support staff – he said, "is almost kind of tricky downtown."
"We've resolved some things and some things are still hanging out there. When you have something as complex as this and two buildings joined at the hip as it were and the different components within the commercial insurance policies, it just is a time-consuming process," he said.
A day after the fire, the firm had found temporary quarters in the Interstate Research Park in north Champaign, where it remains.
"It's a little bit of a miracle that we were able to find a space within a day and were somewhat up and running within a few days," he said. "Once we got here, it forced us to streamline. Before, we had tons of storage for things we really didn't need."
The entire upper floor of their historic building, where the firm had been since 1990, was filled with old files and drainage maps for the countless drainage districts the firm has represented over the years. The contents of their building were mostly damaged by water and smoke as opposed to flames. The common wall with the Metropolitan building was deemed unable to support the remaining structure.
In the first few months after the fire, dealing with the fallout from it was overwhelming.
"We were dealing with the city almost daily in December, trying to figure out how to preserve a building that was a landmark on some level," he said.
They were also dealing regularly with two insurance companies but that has slacked off somewhat.
"We're still sorting out issues on various pieces of coverage for different types of things. For example, we might have business interruption insurance and contents coverage. With the way coverages go, you can have overlapping language (in policies). It's a bit of a mind bend to figure out what goes in what category."
Hall said they've had tremendous help from the insurance people who deal with that language daily.
"Then you have we lawyers who tend to see lots of ambiguities," he said, laughing at "the curse of the analytical mind."
"We have resolved some things and have received some portions of claims," Hall said, declining to specify the value of the building. "There are other portions that are unresolved. I would say that overall, we're 75 to 80 percent resolved."
"In America, we like everything to happen immediately. Sometimes we have to be patient," Hall said.
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