Fast-growing Law Firm Bulks up With Loop Riverfront Lease

Croke Fairchild Duarte & Beres is bucking the Loop’s office downsizing narrative, inking a larger lease and consolidating its downtown space in a riverfront tower on LaSalle Street.

The fast-growing Chicago law firm signed a lease for about 40,000 square feet on the fifth floor of the building at 222 North LaSalle Street, Crain’s reported. The move will allow the firm to expand from the roughly 25,000 square feet it currently leases across two offices at the buildings at 180 North LaSalle Street and 191 North Wacker Drive, both of which it plans to vacate.

The deal stands out amid record high downtown office vacancy and a steady drumbeat of companies shedding space, as hybrid work settles in. While some large law firms have leaned into that trend, Croke Fairchild is moving in the opposite direction, joining a small but notable group of legal practices that have recently taken bigger offices. According to the outlet, Cleveland-based Benesch Friedlander Coplan & Aronoff and Chicago-based Goldman Ismail Tomaselli Brennan & Baum have also expanded their downtown spaces over the past year.

Croke Fairchild embraced remote work early, using flexibility as a recruiting tool and widening its talent pool, said managing partner and co-founder Drew Beres. But rapid growth changed the math on needed office space. The firm added 25 attorneys last year, bringing its headcount to about 110, and is increasingly running into space constraints when lawyers and staff choose to be in the office at the same time.

“We’ve noticed as we’ve given people that freedom and flexibility, it seems like people want to come to the office even more,” Beres told the outlet. “We wanted to make sure we accommodated that.”

The 27-story, roughly 1 million-square-foot building at the southwest corner of LaSalle Street and Wacker Drive is owned by the Chicago-based Crown family and was already 93 percent leased before the deal, according to CoStar data. A spokesperson for the Henry Crown holding company did not respond to a request for comment.

The firm’s departure from the building at 180 North LaSalle will be felt more sharply. The 38-story tower, owned by Montreal-based La Caisse, is about 64 percent leased, well below the downtown average of roughly 72 percent, CoStar data shows, but the building at 180 North LaSalle sits across from the James R. Thompson Center, which Google is redeveloping into its Chicago headquarters, a nearby catalyst that could eventually lift demand.

Filling space remains challenging: The Loop finished 2025 with a net loss of about 370,000 square feet of tenants compared with 2024, according to CBRE.

— Eric Weilbacher