As the contractor of choice for stylish and space-efficient office spaces, Balfour Beatty is leveraging our leading interiors expertise to meet the unique goals of legal clients across the Carolinas. Our progressive and highly customized approach builds on a longstanding record of operational excellence and best-in-class customer service in this vital market sector. Balfour Beatty is delivering innovative law offices that promote confidentiality, culture-setting layouts that draw in new talent and expedited project deliveries to elevate our clients’ employee and customer experiences.

To drive greater creativity and collaboration, many industries are changing their office design and construction approach to prioritize communal spaces where employees and clients interact. Because of modifications to floorplate design and budget allocation, individual workspaces have necessarily trended toward maximizing space efficiency. While many industries have eliminated private offices, the confidentiality inherent to legal work requires their retention—but in a newly reinvented form.

As the No.1 Interior Tenant Improvements contractor in the Southeast (Engineering News-Record), Balfour Beatty is uniquely positioned to deliver dynamic, innovative and functional spaces that set firms apart with a highly customized approach to each client’s needs.

Maximizing Your Footprint

“Front-of-house” spaces, including common areas, reception and meeting rooms, are critical to attract new talent and customers. However, larger spaces can also present unique acoustical challenges for tenants.

In the Carolinas, Balfour Beatty is pioneering the use of Acoustibuilt ceiling material to reduce ambient noise in public spaces like lobbies, larger conference rooms and employee break areas. An Armstrong Ceilings product, Acoustibuilt tiles offer superior sound absorption over a drywall ceiling while maintaining the same professional look.

Balfour Beatty is also pioneering the law office applications for micro perforated wood veneer ceilings, a material with the appearance of solid wood but the performance of acoustical ceiling tiles.  At a confidential legal client’s office upfit in Charlotte, North Carolina, Balfour Beatty worked with the client and our design partners to construct a beautiful geometric micro perforated wood veneer ceiling in the employee break area, a feature as aesthetically appealing as it is practical and sound dampening.

Another distinctive feature of the project was a monumental floating staircase connecting all three floors of the office. The existing core and shell structure already featured concrete floors secured by embedded post-tension cables. To cut floor openings for the stairwell, the Balfour Beatty team shored and reinforced all three floors with carbon fiber before de-tensioning, resetting and re-tensioning the necessary cables.

This high-risk engineering solution required meticulous planning and surgically precise execution to ensure structural integrity of the staircase and concrete floors. Through this expert approach to unique project solutions, the team successfully achieved the client’s desired aesthetic of continuity and cohesion between the floors.

Constructing Confidentiality

Privacy is imperative when constructing a law firm. Our teams help each client explore their confidentiality enhancement options and related industry trends.

One of our standard practices is to help a firm narrow its design choices for individual offices and then create mockups for the selected products. On the Charlotte project, for example, Balfour Beatty fully constructed a side-by-side mockup of identical offices with different materials on the jobsite. Structurally and aesthetically, these mock-ups reflected a fully finished product surrounded by an otherwise unfinished floor on the jobsite.

The mock-ups provided our clients the opportunity to experience every aspect of the office’s privacy measures, from noise insulation to door and window films, and to understand the cost implications of each design decision. Even lights, white noise machines and HVAC systems are installed to accurately reflect the ambient sound in a finished office. Ensuring our client makes informed choices for their office’s needs reduces risk of costly re-work later.

Clients also often choose extra layers of drywall between offices, full height walls on all sides of the offices, sound seals at exterior windows, and white noise machines to further enhance confidentiality.  Balfour Beatty leaves no stone unturned in pursuit of the best privacy options for our legal clients, even ensuring that back-to-back power outlets between offices are installed with special acoustical seals. 

Fostering Every Client Relationship

Our guiding philosophy with every client is to build a relationship that is as deeply personal as it is professional. Each project presents a new opportunity to guide our clients as a true construction partner, offering options to push boundaries of office design in both form and function, achieve maximal value and leverage creative, outside-the-box solutions to meet their needs.

The same principles of accelerated schedules, efficient project coordination and customized features guide every Balfour Beatty upfit. With the best trade partners, industry-leading architects and project teams that personally understand each firm’s goals, we create world-class spaces that exemplify our clients’ cultures, attract new talent and garner new clients.