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Lexington, KY – It was called Project Star, and soon it would brand the people representing a law firm looking at Lexington for the possible relocation of its global services center and along with it, some 250 jobs.
In the week leading up to Memorial Day, officials from Boston-based Bingham McCutchen, an international law firm with 1,000 attorneys and 900 support staff in 14 cities around the globe – came to Lexington to get a first look at the city that had survived the cut as they narrowed down from an initial 300 metro areas as just the right place to consolidate support services for the firm.
Mayor Jim Gray hosted a reception for the group along with a bevy of Lexington economic development officials. The mayor extended his hand, welcoming them not only to his city, but also into his home, where the initial reception was held.
“Hello, I’m Jim Gray,” would be requited with a polite nod and a “good to meet you.” There were no return introductions.
“They were incredibly disciplined in maintaining their anonymity,” Gray said. “Incredibly disciplined and successful, in fact they didn’t even give first names. I’ve been around the site selection business all my life and they were about as effective as anybody I’ve ever worked with.”
Gray, who as CEO of Gray Construction helped in the site selection and construction of facilities for companies like Toyota, Nissan, BMW’s North Carolina plant and Hyundai’s Alabama plant, is no stranger to the process of bringing jobs into a community and remaining stealthy until the deal was done.
But this time, as mayor of a city hoping to be chosen, he and the rest of those looking to bring jobs into town were left completely in the dark as to exactly whom they were working with.
“Very quickly your instincts tell you whether someone is for real or not if you’ve done it for years. Right out of the gate I sensed that this is for real, this is the real deal and this is a big deal in terms of creating career opportunities,” Gray noted despite secretive nature of Bingham’s representatives.
“It was very stressful, actually,” said Bingham’s COO Tracee Whitley when asked about their process. “We’re a collegial firm and this is a collegial place. You’d much rather be able to be open, but for a variety of reasons [we couldn’t]… until we were ready to, until it was appropriate for our firm.”
As news filtered out last week that Bingham would bring support jobs from its American offices to Lexington, employees in those cities learned that they would have to be relocated as a result of the move. That was information Bingham didn’t want known until the deal with Lexington was all but done and they could talk to their employees.
As a result, it was only a few weeks prior to the official announcement that anyone in Lexington knew it was Bingham, a perennial ‘best place to work’ award winner with annual revenues around $860 million and offices in Beijing, Boston, Frankfurt, Hartford, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York, Orange County, Portland, San Francisco, Santa Monica, Silicon Valley, Tokyo and Washington.
To compensate, Commerce Lexington’s Senior VP for Economic Development Gina Greathouse said they started making up names the Bingham reps, all with the last name “Star.” The first, Bingham’s point person on the project, COO Whitley, was dubbed “Ringo.” From there, others with Bingham named themselves, Greathouse said.
As Lexington looked more and more like the final choice, Bingham employees began dealing directly with Lexington officials rather than using their San Francisco-based consultant, Mark Klender of Deloitte as a go-between. But in order to do that, dummy Gmail accounts were setup with their “Star Names” so Commerce Lexington and others could interact directly with the likes of Rock Star, Blazing Star, Death Star, Shining Star, Rising Star, Lone Star and Shooting Star, Greathouse said.
“Now we’re corresponding with them via their Bingham (email addresses)…But as they sign off on their emails now, they still sign off with their Star names,” she said.
Despite not knowing who they were dealing with, Greathouse said the details of what they were hoping to attract to Lexington were clear from an RFP sent by Deloitte in February.
“We knew it was a global services center, but we had no idea who it was and we were encouraged not to do much research on it. We put a lot of trust into the hands of Mark Klender with Deloitte. But we knew from the RFP that it was going to be a great project,” she said.
While the “what” was known for a long time, it was only a matter of a few weeks before the “who” became apparent. Greathouse said she and others at Commerce Lexington were informed on a conference call, but they had long before signed non-disclosure agreements about the project. Gray said he was informed shortly before a trip to Boston a few weeks ago to meet with Bingham officials.
Since the late May visit, Bingham officials were back in town each of the next two months and again last week to meet with city council. Although news of the relocation plan broke last Wednesday when the company appeared before the Kentucky Economic Development Authority to formally apply for state tax incentives, an official announcement is planned for Thursday.
While in town, Bingham officials met with the area’s colleges and universities including UK’s deans of law, engineering, communications and business, according to Greathouse. In fact, she said, more than 100 people locally played a role in brining Bingham’s global services center to Lexington.
Despite the promise of keeping information close to the vest, Whitley said she was attracted to Lexington because of the community’s openness.
“The people were the biggest draw,” she said. “We’d already done our research before we got here, we looked at several hundred potential sites and we had done a lot of work on the data supporting that this could be a good business decision for us. But was important for us to come and really see if the data matched up with our fit and the needs for the people."
The center is scheduled to open in April on UK's Coldstream Research Campus and will employ a mix of local workers and those who have chosen to relocate from other Bingham offices.