Test Case: It’s The End Of The World As We Know It, And I Helped Plan My Law Firm’s First Open House

Lately a lot of people haven’t been in a celebratory mood, unless you like watching the world burn. But my law firm has had holding an open house to mark our office’s move to downtown Seattle on our to-do list for the past THREE YEARS, and we’d finally agreed upon a party date. So it was decided that a nationwide political apocalypse couldn’t justify further delay.

Accordingly, because I am the law-firm partner without male genitalia and am known to throw a bitchin’ Easter brunch, I was tasked with planning the event along with my right-hand woman Whitney. (Whitney started out at my firm as a bookkeeper, but now she has such a wide swath of responsibilities that her official job description is “is Whitney.”)

First we needed to come up with a party theme. I had a big bag of “unearned” Mardi Gras beads obtained during a law conference in New Orleans, which sparked the idea to throw a Fat Tuesday-inspired soiree. This decision seemed a bit risky, but I wanted to justify lugging 25 pounds of shiny plastic jewelry across the country a year ago.

Next we crafted a guest list of people willing to hang out with us. This was tricky, since you have to consider the ambiguous purpose of a law-firm open house. Is it for marketing purposes, meaning you should exclude competitors, or are you simply showing off your firm’s square footage and view of the YMCA next door? We weren’t sure, so we invited potential referral sources and past and current clients who hadn’t yet threatened us with bar complaints.

Next we ordered decorations from Amazon. Our standard for acceptable décor was: “Is this so tacky that it makes us throw up?” Relying on this low threshold, we filled our checkout cart with enough purple, gold, and green metallic crap to outfit a middle-school dance. We also sprung for a bunch of colorful hats and feather masks that I would later force onto people for photo ops.

The hardest part of the planning was figuring out what to do about feeding people. I’ve been to attorney parties that go the cheese-and-cracker route, and I’ve been to lawyer events with dessert tables that could have come from a royal wedding. Because we wanted Southern-style food and my law partner Stephan always wants to go the fancy-pants route, we decided hire a caterer.

This was new territory for us, given that our firm events usually involve deciding which type of pizza to order. I didn’t want exotic cuisine, since I didn’t want to pay for stuff many people aren’t willing to eat, but Stephan met with the caterers while I was at a law conference in Vegas and planned a menu loaded with seafood, including oysters. (Insert an image of my squinty-eyed Revenge Face here.)

To save money on booze—when you own a small law firm, you are never not thinking about ways to control costs—Whitney and I braved Costco during an afternoon that felt like we were playing hooky from work. In retaliation against Stephan—who had promised “no oysters”—I bought a bunch of Costco-brand beer and wine, since he was aghast at the idea of serving “the cheap stuff” at a firm event. We also bought cookies and flowers. Our shopping cart looked like it belonged to the organizer of a very booze-heavy book club.

The evening of the event, all the ladies got dolled up in our office building’s locker room and started the classic pre-party panic move of worrying about whether anyone was going to show up. I was having visions of a party attended only by our law-firm employees, gazing at our oyster platter and wishing it was a plate of grilled cheese sandwiches (maybe that would have just been me).

Around official party time, however, people started coming through the door, including non-lawyer friends of mine who I invited just in case nobody else showed up to deplete the Costco beer supply. The party was a whirlwind of reminiscing with past clients about difficult cases and shoving my camera into people’s faces, all perfumed by the intoxicating scent of a seafood buffet. (Full, grudging disclosure: The caterers did a great job, and even supplied and cleaned up the dishes.)

At the end of the evening, a bunch of us crowded into the conference room, where we attacked the cookies and the remaining store-brand beers. My night ended with a light-rail trip to Dick’s Hamburgers, which cost a lot less than our catering.

The next morning, I stopped by the office to turn off a lamp. (Seriously, the thought of leaving it on all weekend was bugging me.) Our conference table was crowded with party detritus, including a sippy cup half full of wine that said “I rock. You rock. We rock.” With that, the event was deemed a success.

Lawyers are not party planners, but sometimes we have to take on that role. Here are some tips that Whitney and I learned along the way:

• Pick a set date (so the event actually happens), and then do everything you can in advance: Getting stuff done ahead of time saves money and stress. For example, it took time to find a caterer who could do Southern food for a relatively small event like ours. Also, some of our party decorations also took longer to ship than expected.
• Make lists: Just the process of making lists helped us figure out what we needed to get done. Brainstorm potential problems and solve them before they come up.
• Use what you already have: I found old speakers in my storage room from some old boyfriend and we used those. My law partner’s wife sent him to the office with their cooler and drink tub.
• Test your tech in advance: The day before the party, we made sure the speakers worked (we used a “Mardi Gras” station on Pandora, and avoided commercials by signing up for a free week subscription). We also had a photo slide-show on our conference room computer, and made sure that worked ahead of time.
• Use your event as an excuse to spiff up your office: We had our building maintenance people hang up the wall art we never had gotten around to putting up. Someone finally cleaned out the fridge. I also decorated an empty office so it didn’t look so damn spooky and lonely.
• Coordinate with your office building: Whitney had to work with our building’s management team to make sure that people could take the elevator up after hours, and had to provide documentation of our caterer’s insurance and proof that we got a liquor permit.
• Invite more people than you would like at your party: People bail. And very rarely do party hosts—other than high-school kids throwing ragers while the parents are out of town—say: “Wow, I wish fewer people had shown up to our party.” But have a plan in case party supplies get low (we have a drugstore on the commercial level of our building).
• Delegate to the right people: My colleague Dainen is tech-savvy, so he was in charge of music and the slide-show; receptionist Vanessa has a secret talent for arranging flowers; and Stephan is good at ordering seafood behind my back.
• Use name tags: Office parties are a place where your professional and personal worlds collide. People don’t know each other, and it is hard to remember names when you are talking to a bunch of people and drinking Costco-brand Pinot Grigio.
• Expect and laugh at mishaps: My paralegal Marison for some reason decided to mangle half of the flowers we bought. It made no sense and was hilarious.
• If you pick a theme, choose one with a lot of available food and décor available: It might feel less creative, but trust me, Amazon will have your back if you go somewhat generic.
• Try to hand out photo accessories and snap shots right when people show up: That way you can make sure all guests are included in at least one photo when you post about your event online. (Speaking of which, post photos about your event online. If it doesn’t show up on Facebook, it didn’t happen. Just be sure to keep things classy (e.g., no sippy cup photos)).
• Be flexible: You can’t control all aspects of party planning, and people don’t like all the same things you like. If you force everyone to go your way, you will piss people off or become President of the United States.

Now go celebrate, people, while the world is still turning.

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Allison Peryea is a shareholder attorney at Leahy Fjelstad Peryea, a boutique law firm in downtown Seattle that primarily serves community association clients. Her practice focuses on covenant enforcement and dispute resolution. She is a longtime humor writer with a background in journalism and cat ownership. You can reach her by email at [email protected].