Oct 12, 2015 | Cleveland Office

Roetzel & Andress Redesigns Cleveland Office
Renovated Workspace Creates Innovative Space for Attorneys and Staff

The Cleveland office of national law firm Roetzel & Andress recently rolled out its new office space at One Cleveland Center, featuring an innovative, redesigned space that provides attorneys and staff with room to work both collaboratively and independently, while leaving plenty of room for growth.

The project, which began in early May of this year and wrapped up in mid-September, relocated the entire staff from the ninth floor of the One Cleveland Center building to the tenth. The new space, designed by architect Margaret Nysewander of ASD Design in Atlanta, makes more efficient use of the available square footage, adding additional attorney offices and redesigning workspace for administrative personnel and staff.

“We added internal private offices for future growth that double as meeting rooms for the time being. We took the secretaries that were distributed in pairs around the office and created workstation clusters of secretaries and paralegals in larger areas at ends of the building. The open environment fosters communication as well as speeds the learning curve for younger staff as they are exposed to work style of others around them,” said Nyswander.

Roetzel, in creating a more flexible working environment, along with a “one-size fits all” office for attorneys, is on trend according to Nyswander, with larger offices for partners becoming a thing of the past.   

Conference rooms are also state-of-the-art. To offset the potential for increased ambient noise, the firm chose to incorporate white noise in the conference center, something that Nyswander notes is becoming common practice for many offices. The new conference center utilizes glass partitions with banded film for visual privacy.

“Intermediate partitions are built to deck with sound attenuation, so between this approach and the use of sound masking, the conference center is acoustically private room to room,” said Nyswander.

Mr. Robert Blackham, Partner-in-Charge of Roetzel’s Cleveland office, said that the redesign accommodates the firm’s need for room to grow without also growing the office’s square footage.

“This more efficient use of our space allows us to better control our overhead and maintain our fixed occupancy cost at a level that further sharpens Roetzel's competitive edge in the legal marketplace.”

“The fact that we’ve been able to add additional attorney offices, staff workspaces, and conference rooms, while utilizing the same square footage as our prior location on the ninth floor, speaks volumes about the efficiency of Ms. Nysewander’s plan,” said Blackham. “Our new space really is state-of-the-art. We have more usable space than we had before, but without feeling cramped or crowded.”

Roetzel & Andress has further office renovations on tap for 2016 in its Orlando, Florida, location. ASD Design will also serve as architects for the Orlando office, utilizing similar design considerations for the efficient use of available space, but with a different look and feel from its work in Cleveland.

“Orlando’s design has clean lines, similarly simple and hopefully timeless, however the color palette down there is a bit brighter, probably a bit more ‘Florida,’” remarked Nysewander. “Since it is new space, we had the opportunity to do glass fronts on the private offices, which will ultimately make the interior workspace an ideal environment.”

View PDF