Wilson Sonsini bolsters Palo Alto office market with 190K sf HQ lease renewal

Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, the Bay Area’s largest law firm by headcount, signed a long-term lease renewal on its Palo Alto headquarters, a vote of confidence in an office market that’s hit a rough patch over the past few years.

The deal, which closed earlier this month, keeps Wilson Sonsini in a 190,000-square-foot office building at 650 Page Mill Road in the Stanford Research Park through 2039, CommonWealth Partners, its landlord, told The Real Deal. The firm has been based there since 1994, when the two-story Class A building was completed. It’s half a mile from a Caltrain station and a five-minute walk from the intersection of El Camino Real and Page Mill Road, one of the city’s busiest intersections.

“Our Palo Alto office has always been the base for a significant percentage of our attorneys and professional staff, and our location allows all of us to be in close proximity to the many companies, investors, and other institutions in the area that are driving the global economy,” Wilson Sonsini’s Douglas Clark said in a statement.

The firm has 282 partners in Palo Alto, representing about 60 percent of its total number of lawyers in the Bay Area at the start of this year, according to a CommonWealth spokesperson and the San Francisco Business Times.

Wilson Sonsini didn’t respond to calls and emails seeking comment.

The deal is Palo Alto’s largest office lease renewal in five years and the second-largest of its kind in the city’s commercial property market during that time, behind Google’s 208,000-square-foot deal spanning five research buildings at 3400 Hillview Avenue, according to Colliers data. It’s a welcome bit of news for an office market that had a 14 percent vacancy rate at the end of last quarter but is starting to show some signs of recovery.

It also comes as city officials go about figuring out how much to charge companies via a proposed per-square-foot office tax, which its business base roundly opposes. The Palo Alto City Council is expected to vote in June on whether to put the tax to voters on the November ballot.

While some real estate brokers are concerned that the levy will lead companies to reconsider their commitment to Palo Alto, the Wilson Sonsini deal shows that it’s not one of them. The firm was founded in Palo Alto in 1961 and has kept its headquarters there despite becoming a multinational business over the years, opening offices in Shanghai, New York, London, Los Angeles and a dozen other cities in the U.S. and abroad. It had 962 lawyers worldwide at the end of last year, up almost 10 percent from 2020, according to Law.com.

The firm brought in $547 million in net income in 2021, a 15 percent increase from the previous year, Law.com said. It advised on 42 initial public offerings worth $12 billion last year, including mobile gaming company AppLovin’s $2 billion IPO, and 220 mergers and acquisitions valued at $90 billion. The life science and tech industries fueled Wilson Sonsini’s growth and expansion into Boulder, Colorado and Salt Lake City, Utah, Law.com said.

Newmark’s Howard Dallmar and Washington Realty Group’s Eric Berson represented Wilson Sonsini in its Palo Alto lease renewal. The brokers and CommonWealth, which represented itself in the deal, declined to disclose lease terms.

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