I've walked past that corner at 14th and Phillips a hundred times, thinking it was just another old building downtown — until someone told me it houses one of the oldest law firms in South Dakota. Davenport, Evans, Hurwitz & Smith has been around since 1949, and you can feel the weight of all those years when you step inside.
They handle the kind of law that makes businesses run — mergers, real estate deals, estate planning, corporate litigation. Not the flashy stuff you see on TV, but the contracts and filings that keep family businesses from falling apart when the founder retires or a partnership dissolves. I talked to someone who used them for succession planning after their father passed, and they said the firm knew exactly which questions to ask before anyone else even thought of them.
The building itself is unassuming — brick, practical, the kind of structure that's been part of downtown since before the first Zip Feed Tower went up. Inside, it's quiet in that lawyerly way, all dark wood and closed doors. The partners have been with the firm for decades, which means they've seen Sioux Falls grow from a city of 80,000 to nearly 200,000 — they know who owns what, who's related to whom, and which handshake deals from 1987 are still causing problems.
The Google reviews sit at a four, and honestly, that tracks. Law firms aren't in the business of making everyone happy — they're in the business of protecting their clients, which sometimes means the other side walks away annoyed. But the people who've worked with them long-term seem loyal, the kind who call the same attorney for twenty years because they trust the advice, even when it's not what they wanted to hear.
If you need a firm that knows Sioux Falls in its bones, this is one of them.
— Grace