At age 47, Bryce Wilcox now is one of the oldest members of the management team at Lukins & Annis PS, which is among Spokane's largest law firms and is observing its 40th anniversary this year.

Of the three lawyers who make up the firm's revamped board of directors, one, Mike Maurer, is a few months older than Wilcox, its president, and the other two, Paul Davis and Brady Peterson, both still are in their 30s.

Lukins & Annis has gone through a "fairly dramatic" generational shift over the last several years, Wilcox says, as the founding members of the firm have given way to a younger cadre of legal specialists eager to build on what the founders started.

The transition has come in the midst of a recession that's hammered the real estate market, where the firm has a sizable number of clients. Also, it has included a change in management structure under which it now has—in Wilcox—one lawyer who is devoted largely to overseeing the firm's day-to-day operations.

"It's had its challenges," admits Wilcox, a commercial litigator who took over as president of the firm about a year and a half ago, succeeding Terry Whitten, but he adds, "I think things are going very, very well. For me, it's exciting."

Under the firm's former management structure, members of its three- to five-member board shared oversight duties while also maintaining full-time practices. Wilcox says the primary reason for the structural change, which occurred at the beginning of this year, was a recognized need "to have one person be a steward of management and strategic planning and vision."

Lukins & Annis has been able to weather the recession well, thanks largely to the resilience of the bulk of its clients, and over about the last year has "really started to see an uptick in in billings," he says.

The firm employs 30 attorneys, and 60 people overall, and plans to add two more attorneys this year. It occupies all of the 16th floor and most of the 15th floor of the Washington Trust Financial Center downtown at 717 W. Sprague, where it has been located since 1974, two years after forming. It also operates branch offices in Coeur d'Alene and Moses Lake.

Its areas of practice emphasis include business transactions and litigation, banking and finance, real estate and land use, estate planning and probate, employment, patents, tax law, and environmental law.

Some of its higher-profile Spokane-area clients include Washington Trust Bank, Mountain West Bank, The Wolff Co., SRM Development LLC, Rosauers Supermarkets Inc., and Yoke's Foods Inc.

"Our core focus remains on business," Wilcox says. "We represent a lot of small businesses."

Internally, he says, its three primary focuses are providing an excellent work product, showing a strong commitment to the community, and maintaining a good work environment for its employees.

"Part of my role is mentoring," he says, noting that the firm puts a strong focus on bringing in summer associates after two years of law school for some hands-on experience, and likes to grow its ranks with highly moldable recent law school graduates.

In that sense, he says, he's emulating the guidance he and many other young lawyers received from the firm's founders, Scott Lukins, who passed away in 2010, and Gene Annis, who retired at the end of that year.

While law school does a good job of teaching students the law, it doesn't teach them how to be lawyers, Wilcox says.

"In my case, and for many of my colleagues, we learned that in large part from observing Scott and Gene," he says. "They were not only exceptional attorneys, they cared about younger lawyers and the staff that worked with them. They always had time to say a kind word to a staff member or answer even the simplest questions from younger lawyers learning the ropes."

Also, setting a standard as role models, Lukins was active civically, he says, while Annis won state and national recognition as a trial lawyer.

Lukins was a tax attorney and Annis was a litigator when they started the firm in 1972 with eight lawyers. It expanded rapidly over the rest of that decade, becoming at times the largest law firm in Spokane, and opened the satellite offices in Coeur d'Alene and Moses Lake, in 1985 and 1992, respectively.

The firm now has some national and international clients, Wilcox says, but its main service area is regional, stretching from the Puget Sound area into Montana and from Canada into Oregon.

Transitioning between generations in a law firm isn't easy, and—aside from dealing with ownership, compensation, and control issues—requires working over a period of years with clients of retiring lawyers to ensure they're comfortable with the looming changes, Wilcox says.

"We were able to emerge a stronger firm," he says, "thanks in large measure to the fact that both Scott and Gene allowed the next generation of lawyers great freedom in dealing with the transition issues. As founders of the firm, they both sure had the right to exercise much more control over the process than they did."

Annis—now retired for about 14 months, but still in contact with Wilcox—says, "It's gone remarkably smoothly."

He says he takes pride in the way the firm has transformed under younger leadership, but he adds with a smile that he's also happy to be leaving the stress and challenges of running the law firm in someone else's hands.