April 23, 2007
THE DAILY JOURNAL
By William-Arthur Haynes
SAN FRANCISCO – In some ways, land use is an odd practice.
So opined Timothy A. Tosta on Friday, shortly after Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps announced that he and a team of two other partners and two associates would join the firm’s San Francisco office at month’s end.
“It’s a unique practice that’s as much dependent on people skills and insights that are nonlegal as it is on any kind of legal skills,” he said.
Tosta’s decision to leave 60-attorney Steefel, Levitt & Weiss was more cerebral than the frequent grass-is-greener – economically speaking – approach to lateral movement cited by cynics.
“For me, I was looking for a closer alignment in values and how I wanted to conduct my life,” Tosta said outside a chic San Francisco bistro. “That’s not a question about law, your ethics or profitability; it’s a question of comfort.”
Tosta, real-estate partners John W. Truxaw and Edward Stevens Atkinson Jr., and associates Jennifer E. Renk and Joseph Ferrucci will add more than 200 matters and an estimated $4 million in business to Luce Forward’s eight-attorney San Francisco practice when the move becomes official April 30.
Tosta, 58, earned his law degree from Boalt Hall; Truxaw, 53, earned his from UC Davis School of Law; and Atkinson, 57, earned his from the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law.
It would be easy to condemn Steefel Levitt for the team’s departure, Tosta said. Earlier this month, prominent land-use, environmental and development law attorney Judy V. Davidoff, along with litigator Arthur J. Friedman and three associates, left Steefel Levitt for Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton’s San Francisco office.
“We’ve had a lot of out-migration from Steefel, and I don’t know what to attribute it to,” Tosta said. “But for me, the pressure of others leaving was also having a certain wear and tear on the people who are working with me. I was looking to move the group into a place where everyone could thrive and feel positive about their prospects for the future, and I think we’ve done that.”
Real-estate attorney and office managing partner Allan E. Low is only too happy Luce Forward could offer the ideal environment for Tosta and company. Before the addition, the firm’s San Francisco office was limited to handling projects in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“This adds an exclamation mark,” Low said. “We can really handle a real-estate project statewide: land-use entitlement, finance it, sell it, buy it, subdivide it. We’re very fortunate that [Tosta] chose Luce Forward to join.”
According to L. William Nason, a San Diego-based recruiter at the legal-placement firm Watanabe Nason Schwartz & Lippman, which engineered the move, Luce Forward and Tosta enjoy comparable repute in the real-estate and land-use arena.
“I don’t think it would be a reach or offend anybody to refer to [Tosta] as likely or perhaps the premier land-use attorney in the Bay Area – he’s pretty much it,” Nason said. “Luce has a splendid reputation throughout California in real estate. It firmly puts their San Francisco office on the map. They’ve got a really good San Francisco office, but this kind of takes it to that next level.”
A Steefel Levitt representative could not be reached for comment Friday.
With his zest for life, Tosta hopes to help his new firm grow. In 1991, the Santa Cruz native was diagnosed with Level 4 melanoma. For the next seven years, he lived under what he calls “an incredible cloud.”
It was concluded that the disease would not metastasize, but the experience changed Tosta’s life and practice.
“In the last several years, I’ve gone through a metamorphosis toward understanding that I could have a tremendous amount of fun doing a lot of good in the community and still be a fine lawyer,” he said. “I wanted to be in an environment that was more in line with my values.”
Again, Luce Forward’s culture seemed the perfect fit.
“We’re more of a progressive, humanistic law firm trying to find that right balance between profitability and people,” Low said. “The push by firms for profitability is sometimes overbalanced to profitability and not people.”
Luce Forward, with 200 attorneys in five California offices, easily could be viewed as a firm destined to merge or fold.
“They are at that comparatively awkward size,” Nason said. “You could call them, over the last seven years certainly, a merger target because they obviously have established beachheads in Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego.”
Nason said Luce Forward has shown “some real staying power” by retaining attorneys at a time when many other midsize firms have “bled profusely” as a glut of national firms have entered the San Francisco and Los Angeles markets during the past five years.