By Michael Randle
When I started reporting exclusively on the South’s economic development scene in the early 1990s, law firms were considered a necessity in just a handful of ways in the industrial site selection process. Back then, they helped structure financing, including tax incentives, and grants for businesses.
Of course, some economic developers and their prospects didn’t have lawyers involved until the final stages of a project. You brought in lawyers during and after the deal was done; an afterthought for the creators of the deal who had completed their parts. They simply prayed the deal was legal; sometimes it wasn’t.
Those were the cowboy days of economic development and I remember them well. I recall one community bypassing a wetlands assessment by simply renting a backhoe. The backhoe was much cheaper to fill that particular wetland than the assessment.
Those days are gone and many law firms that specialize in economic development have set the bar for a new, highly professional site selection process.
In fact, I have been at more than a few rural deals hammered out with a handshake and nothing else until the “work was done.” For example, I was at the The Deery Inn in Blountsville, Tenn., one night in the very early 1990s. There was a Japanese prospect and his translator, the economic developer, two members from his board, the mayor and me. The deal was done over big steaks and beers. That was then.
Today is different: “Economic development today is no longer just about landing a project and figuring out the legal structure afterward. The most successful communities are thinking holistically from the start, aligning incentives, infrastructure, workforce, revitalization, public-private partnerships and long-term community priorities in a way that creates durable growth,” said Britton Bonner, Partner and Executive Committee Member at Adams & Reese.
“Across the Southeast, we are seeing projects that require not only significant capital investment, but also close coordination among businesses, local governments, universities, agencies and community stakeholders. That is where law firms with deep experience at the intersection of business and government can add real value: helping clients navigate complexity, build consensus, and turn economic opportunity into lasting impact,” said Bonner.
Foreign investment spikes in the South in the 1990s and first decade of the 2000s
By the early 1990s, foreign direct investment in the South began to increase at levels never before seen, especially with foreign automakers and their boatloads of suppliers. The South was used to Northern companies doing business. It all started with textiles, apparel, chicken plants, and later, the technology of call centers and their amazingly low “long-distance rates.” That was then, too.
Economic development from cowboys to lawyers
German companies, such as BMW and Mercedes-Benz, had already made their mark with super-premiere, first-time U.S. plant announcements in South Carolina (1992) and Alabama (1993). Many from Japan and Korea would soon follow, as the Japanese already had plants in Kentucky and Tennessee, but those were considered, at the time, “one-offs.”
It wasn’t a one-off to Dennis Cuneo, the site selection boss for Toyota back in the day. In fact, going back to Toyota’s investments post-Georgetown, Ky., in the 1980s (Toyota’s largest worldwide plant), it was the great Dennis Cuneo of Toyota who sited plants in the Southern Auto Corridor. Cuneo helped establish plants from San Antonio, through the Tupelo region, to Jackson, Tenn., to North Carolina to Huntsville and West Virginia.
In fact, Cuneo and then North Carolina Secretary of Commerce Jim Fain walked the site in Liberty County, N.C., almost 25 years ago. (Toyota just opened its battery plant there last year.)
Mercedes and BMW “sophisticated” the practice of economic development in the South
If anything, the two prestigious announcements made four decades ago by the Germans made the world’s business community stand at supreme attention and notice that the South would be on the cusp of a globalization of its economy, something never seen in U.S. history, or at least since Chicago and New York dominated the economies of North America.
That’s when the law firm community in the South saw an opportunity it had never been able to access, mainly because the practice of economic development was such a tiny little world.
Back then you had firm and consistent members and their specific duties during the site selection process:
- First you had the prospect or client, which would be an expanding company.
- In the South, in the beginning, most of those were from up North, which started before, during and after World War II. The Fantus Company was tasked with the relocation of all kinds of industry from Chicago, New York and Boston back in the day. The fear was that too much industry was concentrated in too few places. So the government was convinced to transfer plants to the South to keep the Germans and Japanese from attacking our largest industries, employers and infrastructure. “Move them to the South; no one will notice them down there.”
- The initial connection — whether from an advertisement, trade show, site visit or even better, thousands of advertisements — was directed at those with their site hats on.
- The economic developer worked with the client and in most cases back then, a site consultant hired by the prospect. Few economic developers tipped their hands to site consultants until they had to.
- Trade allies such as contractors, engineers and utilities had their set roles.
- And finally, law firms helped put it all together on legal paper, whether it be the wrap up of incentives, advising on environmental matters and, with foreign companies, immigration matters.
That was still “back then.”
Law firm representatives would include attorneys, CPAs, lobbyists, public affairs professionals and paralegals. But there were no economic developers — those certified with years of recruiting and bird-dogging experience. Or, in a phrase, “Yankee Factory Hounds.”
Things have certainly changed
Today, law firms are spinning off economic development consulting firms and doing their own prospecting with their own generated corporate decision makers all over the world. They are hiring seasoned and certified economic development recruiters to direct their own “big buffalo hunts.”
Not long ago, I guess no more than 20 years, I was blown away by law firms hiring true winners, pure industry recruiters, some with great success in the site selection game. I even said to one law firm executive, “What, you are hiring Simmons? Why? He is not a lawyer. The only way that happens is you want to dig up your own deals. Is that true?”
Today, you can hire a law firm that features creative and flexible fees (not “by the hour”) for multidisciplinary approaches that span the entire length of a corporate site search — from first contact, to real estate, tax, environmental and government relations to construction.
That would include permitting, financing, equipment acquisition, site acquisition, construction, off-site improvements and collaborating with utilities and local and state agencies. Several law firms now employ chief and senior-level economists. They don’t just contract with economists today. They employ them in addition to professional economic developers.
That is now.
What I said to an international media property more than 15 years ago
“Back in the day, the practice of economic development was not even close to being as sophisticated as it is now. Today, the site consultant community has become as professional as can be. This is further supported by law firms and their increased involvement in the site selection process.
“Other than wrapping all the paper work up on a deal, law firms knew little about the recruiting process. Much of that happened through advertising directly to the prospect, the client getting on the phone as a result of the response to that ad, or this or that rote exercise of going to this trade show or that conference.
“And of course, joint, regional or statewide recruiting trips originating from the South and started in earnest in the early 1990s-2000s to foreign nations after a small bit of it in the ‘80s.
“Law firms simply did not know the ins-and-outs that site consultants knew. I mean, that is just how it was. Law firms didn’t have the experience of walking hundreds if not thousands of sites. Economic development then was more of a golf/lunch, golf/dinner at the country club and then an agreement.
“It was more about, ‘What do we do now that we got that deal and ‘who is going to help us get there?’
“Compared to today’s law firm intervention of ‘all things in a deal,’ the practice has eliminated a lot of that always working from behind after capturing a big buffalo. Law firms now are ahead from the start.”
I made those statements shortly after learning about law firms spinning off economic development departments and their own advisory firms.
After all, most site consultants today put years into economic development for a public service, whether with the state, a utility or a locale, before they became site consultants; unless they worked for an engineering firm like Fluor Daniel, for example.
Two perfect examples of working with governments and then starting their own site consulting firms are the late Bob Goforth and Bob Leak, Sr., of the Carolinas. They worked at the local and state levels before they perfected their own site consultant firm, Leak and Goforth.
Law firm client demand has spiked
In a report by Best Lawyers, the third quarter 2025 Law Firm Index, Thomson Reuters found that client demand spiked for one of the best quarters of growth in the 21st century. Part of the article read, “Q3 2025 reflects sustained and robust client activity, signifying genuine expansion beyond merely returning to a baseline pre-pandemic level.”
Then again, we have never seen the level of investment going on today in data centers and A.I., and most of those are in the South. Hundreds of billions are being spent, and the total in two years has exceeded the string of $250 billion invested in the Southern Automotive Corridor from 2021 to 2024 on electric vehicles and batteries.
Think about that. We went gaga when we saw a single $5 billion EV “supplier deal” in Georgia just three years ago. Really? Back in the day, Mercedes and BMW’s initial investments totaled about $1.3 billion combined. Now, we are seeing $50 billion data centers and $55 billion semiconductor fabs.
A huge change in big buffalo projects in the South in 2025
To give you an idea of how the U.S. economy has changed in terms of “normal economic development activity” in the South, look at the following lists.
The first is a normal economic development year of project captures in the South from 1993 to 2024 that announced deals that met or exceeded 200 jobs and/or $30 million in investment. They have been averaged out over 30 years.
For over 30 years, automotive and financial services have been the bedrock in the South’s job and investment generation each year. Not in 2025.
This is a typical industry sector year of deals announced in the South of 200 jobs and/or $30 million in investment or more averaged out since 1993
Industry Sector – Average Yearly Deals from 1993 to 2024
- Automotive 89
- Financial Services 66
- Call Centers 58
- Distribution 55
- Health Care 51
- Food & Beverage 44
- Petrochemicals 37
- Aviation/Aerospace 27
- Renewable Energy 27
- Headquarters 23
- Pharmaceuticals 11
- Data Centers 1.8
*Non-aerospace defense projects
Source: Southern Business & Development. Deals announced meeting or exceeding 200 jobs and/or $30 million in investment in the 13-state American South.
Big change of the guard in 2025
Now, this is what happened in the South, the world’s third largest economy, in calendar year 2025 using the same thresholds. It has continued even stronger in 2026, as the South set a record of 394 deals in the first half.
This is a list of the top industry sector deals announced in the South from January 1 to December 31, 2025, meeting or exceeding 200 jobs and/or $30 million in investment
- Data Centers/A.I. 78
- Aerospace 46
- Metals 37
- Health Care 37
- Pharmaceuticals 34
- Automotive 28
- Financial Services 16
- Electronics/Chips 15
- Defense* 14
- Mining 14
- Food & Beverage 11
- Renewable Energy 7
- Distribution 6
- Call Centers 5
*Non-aerospace defense projects
Source: Southern Business & Development. Deals announced meeting or exceeding 200 jobs and/or $30 million in investment in the 13-state American South.
That’s now.
The data center craze (and it is crazy)
Note that data centers averaged less than two deals a year from 1993 to 2024 in the South, and most of those were announced in Virginia.
It should also be noted that Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel, predicted that up to 1,400 data centers worldwide are expected in a backlog that could last 30 years to resolve. At $8 billion a center on average today, that is $112 trillion in investments by one industry, a total that is more than triple the U.S. GDP last year. I find that hard to believe.
But you can bet law firms are all over these data centers
So, not everyone, including me, is sold on A.I. in general. While traditional industries like automotive and financial services have fallen off their normal 30-plus-a-year deal averages (some by 70 percent last year), it is tough to count on one industry supporting 80 percent of the U.S. economy. That has never been done and it’s pretty scary.
One really smart dude, Mark Vitner, the former senior economist at Wells Fargo and now chief economist at Piedmont Crescent Capital of Charlotte, believes the exact opposite. He makes a great point:
“Economic development has flipped the script, almost as abruptly as RFK Jr. flipped the food pyramid. After decades of engineering the economy for sugar highs, this cycle is being built on protein — capital spending directed toward long-cycle assets such as data centers, energy infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, and aerospace and defense. These sectors are capital-intensive by design: enormous dollar investments, relatively modest job creation, and outsized gains in productive capacity.
“The result is an economy increasingly driven by productivity rather than headcount — one capable of sustaining growth near 3 percent this year even as inflation continues to decelerate toward the Fed’s 2 percent target.” (Before the war started back again.) “By contrast, consumer-oriented investment has shifted into the slow lane, as capital gravitates toward higher-productivity, higher-return activities.”
– Mark Vitner, Chief Economist, Piedmont Crescent Capital
If the first three quarters are any indication, Vitner is correct. Again, the first three quarters of 2026 saw 601 projects meet or exceed our thresholds. That is the most ever in any first half since 1993. That was after the worst first half in 2025, where only 119 projects were announced.
