The NH Bar Association will relocate to the Two Pillsbury Street Building in Concord, which is currently undergoing a complete renovation.  The Bar will occupy a portion of the third floor and will have additional meeting facilities on the ground floor.  Illustration by H.L. Turner Group.

By early next summer, the NH Bar Association headquarters will relocate to a more modern and efficient facility on the third floor of Two Pillsbury Street in the south end of Concord.

The new location, which will include offices for the NH Bar Foundation, has a number of attributes that will make it easier for members to attend meetings or events at the Bar Center and enable the Bar Association to provide better services at a lower per-square-foot cost than it currently pays. Features of the new location include:

• Direct access from exit 12 of Interstate 93, sparing members the hassle of coping with downtown Concord traffic.
• Ample parking for members and other visitors.
• More and larger meeting rooms so that most CLE events can be held in-house, allowing greater programming flexibility and cost savings.
• More conference rooms for committees and sections, or for individual members’ use for client conferences, depositions, closings, and other litigation or transactional activities.
• More efficient member service as all departments will be located on a single floor, providing better access by staff to other departments, shared resources, CLE materials inventory, and conference room space.

The Bar Association will occupy approximately 11,200 square feet on the third floor of the Pillsbury Street building, commonly referred to as the former Blue Cross & Blue Shield headquarters.  The Association will also have the use of additional space on the ground floor, enabling the Association to hold the vast majority of its CLEs in the building rather than renting banquet space in hotels. 

The Pillsbury Street building, vacant for a number of years, is being completely renovated. Due to the extensive nature of the construction, the Bar’s timetable for moving is dependent on the progress of construction, but it will likely be between May and July.

The new location will allow the Bar Association to better serve members. The Bar Association currently has 4,204 active members out of a total (including all inactive categories) of 5,725. At the time of the last move, in 1990, the Bar had 3,078 active members out of a total of 3,545 total members. At the time of the move, the Bar held fewer than 20 CLE programs each year; today, the NHBA CLE program, including video replays and satellite programs, holds more than 80 programs each year.

The Bar’s current quarters, a renovated colonial at 112 Pleasant Street to which the Bar moved in 1990, is owned by the Bar Foundation. David Snyder, Bar Foundation executive director, said the Bar Foundation has decided to move with the Association. He and McCoy have coordinated their efforts to prepare for the move.  The sale of the building, for example, will be contingent on when the Bar Association is able to move into the new space. The move will mean that the Bar Foundation will go from being a landlord to being a tenant, but the Foundation will receive the proceeds of the sale of the Pleasant Street building and invest it to support its regular operations, Snyder said. 

The Bar’s current location has about 7,300 square feet of usable office/conference room space. McCoy said the Bar will be paying less on a per-square-foot basis for the new building than it currently pays at 112 Pleasant Street.

McCoy said that, overall, the increase in usable space is much greater than the simple increase in square footage that the new space provides. The Bar’s offices in the new space will be more efficiently laid out, and will include more space for meeting rooms. Currently, a majority of the Bar’s 27 full-time and 4 part-time employees occupy shared offices.  (There is additional seasonal staff and interns in some departments; these people must share space with permanent employees, creating even more crowding at various times during the year.)

For several years, the Bar leadership and management team have been considering how to address the challenge of safely and effectively providing more services to more members at the Pleasant Street location. An architect and space-planning consultant, Claude Gentilhomme, of Concord, examined the Bar Center’s operations and the building to assess reasonable space needs and provide options for creating more space at the present location. It soon became clear that no feasible plan existed to expand on-site, especially since it was not possible to expand the number of parking spaces. For more than a year, the Bar looked for a feasible location in either the Manchester or Concord area, taking into account the needs of members to have easy access, ample parking, adequate meeting space, as well as the needs for housing the Bar Association’s administrative offices. 

After the Pillsbury Street development came along, the Bar Association negotiated with the developer, Steve Duprey, to obtain office space as well as access to a larger meeting room space on the ground floor, some of which will be “common area” shared with other building tenants. The Bar’s consultant helped the Bar leadership and management team design a layout that will make the most efficient and functional use of the space in the Pillsbury Street building. With its multi-year lease, the Bar Association has a future option to purchase the space as a condominium. In the coming years, the Board of Governors will consider whether it is reasonable to consider purchasing the space, although McCoy said she does not anticipate that the Bar will initiate a capital campaign to raise funds for purchase. “We will be looking at creative options for financing if a space purchase is considered by the Board,” she said.

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New Hampshire Bar Association
2 Pillsbury Street, Suite 300, Concord NH 03301
phone: (603) 224-6942 fax: (603) 224-2910
email: NHBAinfo@nhbar.org
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