Southern California's Silicon Beach has been taking shape for years. The coastal strip that spans the distance between the Los Angeles International Airport and the Santa Monica Mountains is now home to hundreds of entrepreneurs and startups.

As more businesses flock to this fast-growing tech community, they have brought their lawyers along, into a legal ecosystem that has traditionally been known for serving the media and entertainment industry.

Santa Monica (Photo: Jason Doiy/ALM)

Since 2012, five tech-centric law firms—Gunderson Dettmer Stough Villeneuve Franklin & Hachigian, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, Cooley, Fenwick & West, and Goodwin Procter—have all planted flags in Silicon Beach. (Goodwin has Boston roots, but the other four are all based in Silicon Valley.) 

These Silicon Beach pioneers all said they have experienced a growing demand for legal services from the region's fast-evolving tech community.

"The LA tech scene has really centered [itself] here in Santa Monica to an amazing extent," said partner David Young, a co-founder of Cooley's Santa Monica office. He said 40% of the local companies his office works with are within walking distance from its Santa Monica location, as are about 80% of the venture capital firms it works with.

Cooley, which opened that office in 2012 with four founding partners, was the first Silicon Valley firm to set up shop in the so-called Silicon Beach region. Over the years, the office has grown to a total of 46 lawyers. It now has about 90 employees in Santa Monica, the firm's only location in the Los Angeles region.

Dave Young, Cooley Santa Monica (Photo: Jason Doiy/ALM)

"Over time, we have definitely seen the market change," said Young.

Young said that the technology companies in Los Angeles now outnumber the lawyers on the market. He said that's largely due to the fact that most of these companies have turned to Silicon Valley lawyers for their legal needs.

A year after Cooley opened in Santa Monica, Silicon Valley-based Gunderson Dettmer set up a small office in the nearby Venice Beach area. Then, in 2017, Orrick also opened a Silicon Beach outpost, in Santa Monica.

And this March, Goodwin and Fenwick both announced they are opening offices in Santa Monica.

"In 2012, the idea was this is very much rooted in Santa Monica and Venice," said Mike Heath, who co-founded Gunderson Dettmer's Los Angeles office. "Now, the map is much broader, you go all the way down to Manhattan Beach and if not further south down to Long Beach, and then further south into Orange County."

Silicon Beach has grown to include Playa Vista, Culver City, Downtown LA, West LA and other communities that are home to an integrated network of startups and investors.

According to Heath, Gunderson Dettmer has grown its Los Angeles office from one lawyer to nine across the corporate, IP and fund practices. The firm said it is currently working with more than 115 clients in the market.

The Next Silicon Valley?

The tech community in Silicon Beach is already vibrant. According to a 2018 study by marketing agency Mediakix, which analyzed 177 companies headquartered in Los Angeles County, the area's tech industry is estimated to be worth more than $155 billion. 

And a few homegrown Southern California startups such as Snapchat, the Honest Co., and Dollar Shave Club have received billion-dollar valuations.

Snap Inc., the parent company of social media platform Snapchat, moved its headquarters from Venice Beach to Santa Monica last spring. In the last 18 months, a number of major companies with an entertainment bent have also moved into new Silicon Beach office space, and a few more are planning to do so soon. 

Google employees moved from Santa Monica into a remodeled 500,000-square-foot airplane hangar known as the "Spruce Goose" in Playa Vista. HBO, Apple and Amazon Studios are slated to move creative segments of their businesses into new office space in downtown Culver City later this year.

"The number of very large, highly valued technology companies today versus where it was five years ago is 10 [times bigger]," said Andrew Erskine, a partner in Orrick's Santa Monica office.

Erskine, a founding member of the office who has been practicing in Los Angeles his entire legal career, joined Orrick in 2000. He said the firm has been adding lawyers to its West LA outpost to accommodate the growing needs of the startup community in the region. He said the dynamic is different than in Silicon Valley.

"The tech industry is not dominating the entire economy of Los Angeles," Erskine said. "I think there are a lot of founders that are finding it to be refreshing to build companies in a place where people are doing a lot of different things."