by Mike Sharkey
Staff Writer
Attorneys Michael Whalen and Bill Deem have both left two of Jacksonville’s more substantial firms to create Whalen & Deem, LLC in south Jacksonville Beach.
The two-man firm plus an associate has been in the works for a few months, but didn’t become reality until Sept. 1.
Prior to creating the firm, Whalen served as of counsel for the Bedell Firm while Deem was with McGuireWoods.
“We have been talking about doing this for two to three months,” said Whalen, who joined the Bedell Firm in 1980, left in 1997 to own and operate a family business and rejoined the firm in 2001 as of counsel, a position Whalen says means he was neither a partner nor an associate. “I went back in a limited role to help with a couple of cases. That morphed into a full-time job.”
In the new firm, both Whalen and Deem will work on business litigation and commercial litigation while Whalen also plans to do some mediation. Neither live at the beach, but Whalen said they chose the south Jacksonville Beach location because it’s convenient to where they conduct most of their business.
“I think the business center of Jacksonville has shifted to the Southpoint area and we are 10 minutes from there,” said Whalen. “We are right at the base of J. Turner Butler, so we are also only about 20 minutes from Downtown. We still consider ourselves a Jacksonville law firm.”
Whalen, 54, said he and Deem, 48, met in the 1980s and remained friends over the years. They talked several times about starting a small firm because they shared similar feelings about how the small firm would work. Earlier this year, the two got serious and eventually opened Whalen & Deem with plans to grow the firm soon.
“I don’t see us getting to 10 lawyers, but we definitely intend to increase the number of lawyers in the next six months to a year,” he said. “This seemed like the right time to do this.”