Hundreds of San Diego’s attorneys might be practicing in Old Town if a 19th-century civic leader named Thomas Whaley had gotten his way. In 1869, the county began paying him $65 a month to lease space in his Old Town house for a courtroom and repository for county records. Soon after, when Alonzo Horton and other New Town upstarts got the Board of Supervisors to move the county seat to the present Downtown, Whaley and other Old Town civic leaders dug in their heels for a fight.
    They understood that location is everything and that losing the court and county seat status would be a blow to their community. They vigorously opposed the move Ð the judge among them packed the Board of Supervisors with Old Town sympathizers Ð but the Supreme Court quickly undid that action, and the New Towners found a way to outwit the resisters.
    On March 31, 1871, County Clerk Chalmers Scott surreptitiously made off with the county records stored at the Whaley House and took them to the Wells Fargo Building at Sixth and G streets in New Town. The next year, New Town got its first permanent courthouse.
    The county clerk's document raid helped assure that booming New Town would evolve into San Diego’s modern Downtown and the hub of its legal activities. It helped seal the fate of Old Town and Whaley's courtroom as a quaint historic site. The presence of courtrooms and government activities Downtown served as a magnet for lawyers, who over the years increased in numbers and became an essential part of the Centre City scene.
    Of the 4,500 businesses operating Downtown in 1998, a fourth were legal service firms, reports Dun & Bradstreet. And of the 6,230 San Diego County Bar Association members countywide, 2,957 Ð nearly halfÐ practice in the 92101 zip code. Still, the membership is not as heavily concentrated Downtown as it was in 1988 when a survey showed more than two-thirds of the membership worked in the Centre City. At the time, the finding influenced the Bar Association to choose a Downtown location Ð the former University Club building at Seventh Avenue and A Street Ð for its new headquarters. The organization purchased the building and occupied its new quarters in 1989.
    Dalton Menhall, the bar association's executive director, attributes the increase in members outside Downtown to the way the region is developing. "There's been substantial growth in the North County," Menhall says, "and with that has come the growth of the Bar Association there."
    Some Downtown firms are relocating northward, among them Brobeck, Phleger and Harrison. The San Francisco-based firm, with more than 50 attorneys working in San Diego, is moving into a new building under construction and due for completion in February or March. The firm first opened local offices at 225 Broadway in 1987 and later leased 40,000 square feet of space at 550 W. C St. Managing partner Todd Anson says two or three years ago, his firm decided to move closer to North County business clients.
    Property was purchased just north of Highway 56 in Del Mar Heights. The firm already has sold the soon-to-be-completed 72,330-square-foot building at a profit. Brobeck leased back the new building for its offices and will sublease its Downtown office space to other businesses. "We need to be accessible to our (high-tech) clients, and most of our lawyers live north of Downtown along the I-5 corridor," explains Anson. "We killed two birds with one stone."
    But unlike Brobeck, other large firms are maintaining a strong Downtown presence even as they expand to the North. Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich, San Diego’s largest law firm with about 150 attorneys practicing in the county, has offices both Downtown and in the Golden Triangle, where lawyers specialize in licensing, biotechnology patents and other corporate fields. Jeffrey Shohet, Gray Cary's managing partner, says the decision to expand to the north is purely a business necessity, not a lifestyle choice. Many in his firm prefer Downtown, he says, to the North City corporate world of "fake, sterile glass boxes with Kentucky blue grass out front."
    "We are still very much Downtown," says Shohet. "At this point, we have more people Downtown than in the Golden Triangle. We are growing in both offices, but our Golden Triangle office is very successful, and it exists because a large portion of our client base is technology companies."
    For its Downtown activities, Gray Cary has leased six floors Ð the 16th through the 21st Ð in the Wells Fargo Building, occupying five with its own staff and subletting the 21st to legal-related tenants. The leases expire in 2004. "There are no immediate plans to change our current situation," Shohet says.
    So far, the pull of North City and County on law firms is causing little alarm Downtown. Kraig Kristofferson, senior vice president of CB Richard Ellis, who specializes in Downtown leasing, says a major exodus of law firms could have an impact on the Centre City, but he doesn’t expect it will happen.
    "We still see the legal community primarily focused on Downtown," he says. "There's too much a relationship to the courts and government offices." If anything, he says, law firms may find it tougher to find space in Downtown office buildings and may have to pay more. The market is tightening up, with the vacancy rate hovering at 9 percent.
    Todd Stevens, a business and real estate attorney currently serving as president of the San Diego County Bar, agrees that many lawyers Ð particularly the litigators Ð will continue to work Downtown, in large part for the sake of convenience. Driving in from elsewhere, fighting traffic and finding parking are hassles avoided when lawyers can walk to the courthouse. "Lawyers need to get to court in a hurry," he says.
    Moreover, he notes the wave of recent courthouse construction under way demonstrates that the courts will remain Downtown in the foreseeable future. The county's recently opened $61 million Hall of Justice project added 16 civil courtrooms, and the next project Ð designed to replace and modernize 70 existing county courtrooms Ð is in the pipeline.
    The county has hired HOK/Omni Group to do a master plan and environmental and geotechnical studies for the new courthouse over the next year. The preferred site for the $160 million, 379,000-square-foot project is just north of the Hall of Justice between B and C streets. It is scheduled for completion in 2007.
    Meanwhile, the federal courthouse is slated for expansion. The proposed 482,000-square-foot building, with 10 new courtrooms, would go up near the existing federal courthouse on a site bounded by Broadway and F, Union and State streets. Mary Filippini, spokeswoman for the U.S. General Services Administration, says $15.4 million has been earmarked for the site purchase, with construction approval anticipated as early as 2001. The new courthouse project is due for completion in 2005.
    While the Downtown courthouses are expected to keep many lawyers firmly anchored in the Centre City, the increasing attractiveness of the redeveloped urban core also influences decisions on where to rent office space.
    In some cases, lawyers are moving from suburban areas back to Downtown. For instance, the seven-member firm of Laturno & Graves moved from the Golden Triangle to Home Savings Tower Down-town in July, although the firm kept a presence in Escondido to serve North County clients.
    Gary Laturno, a partner in the firm and a former legal counsel with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, says the firm decided to move into the Centre City for a variety of reasons. The attorneys wanted to be closer to courts and other law firms, for instance, and closer to Bar Association activities, which tend to be centered Downtown. But it is also a lifestyle choice.
    "I have a wonderful view of the city," Laturno says. "It’s a fun place to be. We may be immersed in our activities, but we can get out and walk a little bit and smell the fresh air. You can meet friends and have dinner. Life is too short. . . ."