Ann-Marie McGaughey (left) and Alison LaBruyere, Squire Patton Boggs, Atlanta. (Photo: John Disney/ ALM)

Squire Patton Boggs has settled into permanent space with room for more lawyers after launching an Atlanta office in January. It's also just added Alison LaBruyere as of counsel from MidCountry Financial Corp., where she had been general counsel and corporate secretary.

Squire's local managing partner, Ann-Marie McGaughey, predicted more hires in the offing, adding that the firm's lease at 1230 Peachtree St. N.E. in Midtown's Promenade building is for only three years. The firm has taken most of the 17th floor and is building out office space for 11 more lawyers, with the plan of moving into larger digs as the Atlanta location grows.

“We want to outgrow this space,” she said.

LaBruyere spent nine years in-house at MidCountry after starting her career as a corporate associate at Alston & Bird. The financial services holding company offers community banking, mortgage, insurance and consumer finance services through its subsidiaries.

“Alison's breadth of skills and experience, including as the general counsel of a diversified financial institution that she helped lead through a series of strategic investments and divestitures, will be very valuable to our clients,” said Jim Barresi, the head of Squire's global financial services practice.

With LaBruyere, Squire's Atlanta office has 10 lawyers, of whom seven are female. McGaughey joined Squire in January from Dentons to start the new office with two other Dentons partners, Wayne Bradley and Petrina McDaniel. McGaughey and Bradley have cross-border transactional practices, while McDaniel is a commercial litigator and data privacy lawyer.

Dara Mann, another former Dentons partner who handles class action, products liability and toxic tort litigation, joined in May.

While the office is busy—McGaughey said she just hired a litigation associate to support Mann's class action practice and is looking for another corporate associate—she has been hiring at a careful pace.

“We collectively don't want to move fast,” McGaughey said of the office's four partners, “because when building an office, if you feel you need to be a certain number by a certain time, you may make wrong decisions.”

But McGaughey forecast a busy year-end and “significant growth” in January and February, now that she and her Atlanta partners have transitioned clients and gotten to know more of their new partners from Squires' 47 offices worldwide. (The firm's largest offices are in Washington, D.C., London and Cleveland.)

“We've shifted from transitioning clients to full growth mode, and it's that time of year when discussions are picking up again,” McGaughey said.

In addition to the core areas of corporate and litigation, the firm is interested in adding partners in real estate, public policy and public finance to its Atlanta office, McGaughey said.

“You have to be careful with lateral partner hiring,” she added. “You want it to stick. We're not looking to plug in a hole. We're building an office, and we want to create something special.”

“We want somebody fully engaged and committed to their clients and partners, who is really high-performing—but that does not mean they're just billing a lot with a big book of business,” she explained. “We want to create an environment where people are busy but also happy, with a good quality of life. We've found this firm is supportive of that culture.”

McGaughey and the other Atlanta partners have met quite a few of their new Squire partners as the year has progressed. In fact, Barresi, the global financial services leader, was who connected them with LaBruyere.

“Our firm is extremely enthusiastic about the Atlanta office,” McGaughey said, adding that so far they've had visits from Squire colleagues in 15 different cities. “There's a lot of interest, so I spend a lot of time hosting people.”

A lot of those lawyers attended the kickoff party at the Woodruff Arts Center last month for Squire's new Atlanta location. That was preceded by a “Fast Fire with Squire” client CLE that packed presentations on seven hot legal topics—data privacy and how to handle social media crises in high-stakes litigation, for instance—into two hours.

McGaughey said partners from Berlin and Paris had visited last week so their hosts could introduce them to some global companies located in Atlanta, while a London partner was visiting this week and the firm's European managing partner was scheduled for next week.

Some of their colleagues have come to Atlanta to introduce them to client contacts or join them on pitches, McGaughey said, or just to see how they can help. “That's fun—having people who want to do something with you. That's the culture we want to create in Atlanta,” she said.