Want to start a business that can stand a century”™s worth of trials and tribulations? Take Jonathan Mills”™ advice, find a couple things ”“ at most ”“ you can do better than most, and stick to them.
Better yet, find a couple guys who excel and stick to their principles.
Cummings & Lockwood L.L.C. marks its 100th year in business this September, after being founded by Homer Cummings, a U.S. attorney general under President Franklin D. Roosevelt; and Charles Lockwood, a Stamford judge who was considered a potential candidate for governor of Connecticut.
The firm is based in Stamford, and has offices in Greenwich, West Hartford and the Florida towns of Naples and Bonita Springs.
Over time, the firm has endured the Great Depression; enjoyed the arrival of Fortune 500 headquarters in Fairfield County; and hunkered down as Manhattan law firms followed in its footsteps, setting up local outposts.
Since then, some of those firms have retreated back to the city while Cummings & Lockwood has continued to thrive. Cummings & Lockwood closed the year with 230 employees, roughly half of them attorneys and other professionals. In Fairfield County, only Bridgeport-based Pullman & Comley L.L.C. and Cohen & Wolf P.C. report having more attorneys.
While Pullman & Comley itself reached its 90th anniversary this year, both it and Cummings & Lockwood are whippersnappers next to Robinson & Cole L.L.P., a Hartford-based firm with a Stamford presence that traces its history to 1845.
Last year, Robinson & Cole absorbed 30 attorneys from the Hartford office of Thelen L.L.P., one of several large firms nationally to fail during the economic crisis. Among the most recent victims was Wolf Block L.L.P., a Philadelphia firm with a New York City office that ironically succumbed less than a week after announcing the hire of a bankruptcy attorney to staff its Boston office.
Mills said Cummings & Lockwood has not cut any jobs as a result of the current recession, despite a drop in billings as its practice advising on large financial deals has dissipated with the dearth of activity since last fall.
“It is nice to endure,” said Mills, “but I don”™t think anyone here glories in the failures of competitors.”
A graduate of Princeton University and the University of Connecticut School of Law, Mills is a Cummings & Lockwood lifer, having joined the firm in 1985 fresh out of law school. He chairs the firm today and works in the real-estate law practice with 10 other attorneys.
That practice is dwarfed by Cummings & Lockwood”™s mammoth private clients group, which focuses on trust and estate law and is co-chaired by Ed Rodenbach in the Greenwich office and by Terry Tuthill in the Stamford office. Tuthill knows a thing or two about “succession planning” ”“ his father Howard is also an attorney in Cummings & Lockwood”™s private clients group.
With some 70 attorneys, Cummings & Lockwood boasts one of the largest trust practices in the United States, providing counsel to more than 2,500 people last year; serving as or advising estate executors, the company helped dispose of more than $10 billion in assets.
Given the prominence of the firm”™s trust practice, Mills said Cummings & Lockwood has received repeated overtures about merging with firms based in New York City and elsewhere that are eager to build up a national trust and estates practice, but to date the firm has shunned such combinations as potentially weakening the brand name it has built up on that front over decades.
In addition to trusts and real estate, the firm has formal groups covering commercial law and litigation. While the latter practice is not the largest in Connecticut, the company has made a significant contribution to the Connecticut court system the past few years ”“ in 2007, Gov. M. Jodi Rell appointed former Cummings & Lockwood Stamford attorney Chase Rogers as chief justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court.
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is also a former Cummings & Lockwood attorney.
