On July 10, 2012, we stood in Wheeling, West Virginia, with more than 1,500 people to commemorate the decade that had passed since the opening of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe’s Global Operations Center (GOC). Ten years earlier, the building that now serves as the global hub of our operations was a vacant metal-stamping facility that had long ago seen its best days.
The summer celebration took us back to an even earlier time, when we first conceived of our groundbreaking project. In 1999, we were running our roughly 200-member firmwide support teams primarily out of San Francisco. With rapid lawyer growth throughout the firm, we needed additional space and personnel. In the midst of and at the epicenter of the dot-com boom, we also faced not only rapidly rising real estate costs, but we were also strugglingas were all “old economy” businesses in those daysto attract and retain talented support personnel.
