The Spokane law firm Evans, Craven & Lackie PS started small, got bigger, scaled back, and now has settled in at what it feels is a good size.


With 26 years behind it, the firm handles most aspects of commercial and municipal law.


There are few things we dont do today, says Greg Kane, the firms managing partner. The beauty of the firm is that weve branched out over time.


Evans, Craven & Lackie has 14 attorneys, and its main office is located in roughly 5,000 square feet of office space on the second floor of the Lincoln Building, at 818 W. Riverside, in downtown Spokane. Half of its attorneys also practice in Idaho, and the firm maintains a small office in Coeur dAlene where those lawyers work intermittently.


About 85 percent of the firms business encompasses various types of defense work for businesses, nonprofit organizations, and municipalities, Kane says.


One of its strongest focuses is also one of its original areas of practice: insurance defense. The firm has as clients a number of insurance companies that enlist it to defend against insurance claims that end up in court.


Among those clients are St. Paul Travelers, American International Group Inc., and Firemans Fund Insurance.


Generally speaking, Kane says, insurance companies assign a geographic area to a law firm, and the firm handles all litigated claims in that area. The region that Evans, Craven & Lackie covers varies depending on the insurance company, but generally includes Eastern Washington and North Idaho.


The firm also has a long-standing workers compensation defense practice, through which it defends employers that have self-insured workers compensation plans.


Self-insured employers typically are large companies with the financial resources to fund their own plans, rather than buying industrial insurance through the Washington state Department of Labor and Industries.


Among Evans, Craven & Lackies workers compensation defense clients are such big employers as Providence Services Eastern Washington, Empire Health Services, and Spokane County, Kane says.


The firm has handled defense work for Boeing Co.s West Plains plant. Boeing sold that plant to Triumph Group Inc., of Wayne, Pa., in late 2002, but Kane says the firm continues to represent Boeing on a number of lingering claims.


Evans, Craven & Lackie handles other aspects of employment law for both large and small clients.


This is necessary as employers deal with todays ever-expanding laws regarding them and their employees, Kane says.


While defense work makes up a large portion of the firms business, it has seen its business transactions work increase dramatically in the past two years, Kane says. During that time, veteran Spokane attorney James F. Topliff moved his practice to Evans, Craven & Lackie from another law firm here and brought with him a lot of business-transaction and estate-planning work.


That really filled a hole in what we offered, Kane says. That gave us the broad array of services that we need.


Generally speaking, Kane says the only areas of commercial law in which the firm doesnt have experience are intellectual-property law and patent law. For now, the firm doesnt plan to seek expertise in those areas, he says.


Hugh Evans, the firms co-founder, says, Our client list is a lot more stable now than it was early on.


Evans founded the firm in 1978 with Jim Craven and Roger Anderson. Evans and Craven still work at the firm in an of-counsel capacity, but are semi-retired. H. Terrence Lackie, whose name is included in the firms name, joined them shortly after the firm was formed and still practices there.


The firm grew to 24 attorneys and opened an office in Seattle, which Anderson operated. In the late 1980s, however, the firm closed that office, and Anderson remained in Seattle.


Kane says the firm likely will grow gradually in the coming years, adding only two or three attorneys over the next five years.


Were not going to grow for growths sake, he says. Were not a law factory.