Legal News

At Houston?s Bayless & Stokes, It?s Christmas All Year Long

By Ashby Jones

Much has been written since the advent of the internet about law-firm libraries. Most of them go like this: Our lawyers don’t use books anymore, so we’re getting rid of them. (Lawyers without books, who woulda thunk it?!) And that’s leaving room for something else, like associate offices, a conference room, a cafeteria, a lounge, what have you.

But a small firm in Houston is doing something completely different with their newfound space: hawking Christmas ornaments!

That’s right. Several years ago, Dalia Stokes and Bobbie Bayless, the two lawyers who make up Bayless & Stokes, noticed that they weren’t making optimal use out of the firm’s downstairs, street-level rooms, which had once contained books and shelves. (Since 1994, the firm has resided in a 1940s-era house just south of Houston’s River Oaks neighborhood.)

So it set up a Christmas shop in the space, called Christmas Rocks. "The downstairs used to be a law library and conference rooms. But then law libraries went online, we didn’t really need it and we started thinking the space was underused," said Dalia Stokes, a trusts-and-estates lawyer, to the Houston Chronicle’s Mary Flood. "We love Christmas and thought it would fit with the other businesses here."

Prompted by Flood’s story, we had to call and talk to Stokes ourselves. She reiterated that everyone at the firm — Bayless and Stokes (who are “life partners”) and their secretary — also work in the shop. For instance, Stokes said that Bayless, a litigator, was Thursday morning out at a hearing. “But thankfully it ended early,” said Stokes. “I need her back here to help me find a box of ornaments.”

Stokes told us that they pair came up with the idea five or six years ago. Both loved Christmas, and thought the demands of running a Christmas (one month of very hard work followed by 11 sleepier months) was something they could manage. “Legal practice tails off a bit in December anyway,” said Stokes.

The Chronicle’s Flood reports that the store fare runs from “$1,200 for intricately painted Russian linden wood nativities through spare Swedish Santas, cloisonné armadillo ornaments, lawyers ornaments on down to $1.95 for 3-D looking glasses that transform each tree light into a dollar sign.”

Stokes told Flood that the law really brings in the money and even in their fourth year of retail there’s not a big profit. However, said Stokes, the same Internet that caused them to close down the law library is helping them with their retail business.

“It’s a great stress reliever,” Stokes told us. “But I wouldn’t encourage every law firm in the country to do it. I think we’re the only ones.”

Photo: Melissa Phillip/Houston Chronicle

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 17, 2009 (boomark / email).