Legal Limelight: Sara Stock

Sara Stock is many things — she’s an attorney, the CEO and founder of her firm, the co-founder of Legal Back Office — and now, she has added owning and renovating a historic candy factory to her list of achievements.

Recently, Stock purchased the former Mavrakos Candy Company headquarters — a historic building located on Delmar Boulevard in St. Louis. She is renovating the building to create a co-working space for attorneys and other small businesses.

“St Louis has so many beautiful historic buildings. And sadly, the further north you go, the more of them that are vacant,” Stock said. “It was really important to us to be able to take a beautiful piece of history and preserve as much of it as we possibly could, paying homage to what came before us, but then to repurpose it for a new and exciting use.”

Could you tell me a little bit about Stock legal?

I had to figure out how to get sophisticated legal counsel, convince them to work for Stock Legal, but do it in a way that may not make them as much money as they would make at you know, Bryan Cave, Lewis Rice, Polsinelli, Greensfelder, name big firms, right? So I had this fun experiment where I thought, I think I could flip the legal model on its head, and instead of me, as the law firm owner telling the lawyers how many hours they have to work every year to stay employed, I could say to these amazing, talented, experienced lawyers you tell me what you have available. I know every year, life is a little different. People have kids, they have aging parents, they have pulls in different directions with friends, family, etc. And so that’s how the business model of Stock Legal started. The lawyers tell me how many hours they want to bill every year. We meet in September, October, to do that, and then we pay them a salary, which isn’t typical of a smaller law firm when it’s set up this way. So, we pay them a salary, most are W-2 employees, and it’s hours committed, not hours billed, not hours collected from clients, but hours committed times rate, times a percentage. Then we create that as their salary for the year. And so we’ve been able to attract these amazing lawyers, former general counsel, former big firm lawyers, and bill them out at a price that our small to mid-sized business owner clients can afford, because we’re trading a little bit of salary for that, I’m going to say kind of unparalleled flexibility in the market.

Tell us about your work on the building, what inspired the project?

When I left Lewis Rice, it was me and 100 clients. Today, we’re several thousand clients,15 lawyers. We sign 30 to 50 new engagement letters every month. We built a national practice, which is really exciting. And tying it into the building, as we’ve been growing and expanding, we’re just out of room in our current space, which we love. It’s beautiful. We’re in the Central West End, at the heart of the Central West End, so we were looking for options; this building came on the market. It was a beautiful opportunity to take a gorgeous former candy factory with great bones on the north side of Delmar, which is really impactful for me to be a part of trying to help, at least psychologically, move through the Delmar Divide and look at how amazing St Louis is as a whole.

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What has the rehab process been like for the building, and how have you navigated it?

We had to first get the building under contract, then we had to put it on the historic registry. Then in order to make this work, we had to get both federal and state historic tax credits and then new market tax credits; and then figure out how to build in some bridge financing to make it all work. The deal itself when you use those kinds of tax credits, is incredibly complicated. There were five law firms as a part of this transaction. And so, when we finally got to a place where we were able to close in October of last year, it really felt like a triumph. It felt like we were ready to dig in. We were shovel ready. We were really excited to renovate this beautiful building and turn it into not just office space for Stock Legal, but I have a second company, Legal Back Office, that will be in that space. We’re building out a legal co-working space called Counselors Collective, which I’m really excited to start promoting as a way for small law firms to have access to conference space and co-working spaces. That way they’re not put in a position where they’re either working from home, or they’re signing a three- or five-year lease. Then the first floor will have a restaurant, retail, office space and a gym.