Cummings & Lockwood LLC

Managing Partner: Jonathan B Mills
Senior Partner: Laura Weintraub Beck (Firm Vice Chairman & Chairman, Private Clients Practice)
Number of partners: 40
Number of lawyers: 59
Number of fiduciary accountants: 25
Number of paralegals: 7

Firm Overview:
Founded in 1909, Cummings & Lockwood provides sophisticated legal counsel to both private clients and commercial enterprises. The firm’s clients include individuals and families with inherited and newly created wealth, as well as emerging, middle market and Fortune 500 companies. With over 200 employees located in six offices in Connecticut and Florida, the firm has the experience, technology and resources to provide a broad range of trusts and estates, corporate and finance, litigation and arbitration, and residential and commercial real estate services.

Main Areas of Practice:

Private Clients Practice:
Cummings & Lockwood has one of the largest, most skilled and most respected trusts and estates practices in the United States, with a significant private client base of high net worth individuals and families, closely-held businesses, and national charities and foundations.

The firm’s private clients attorneys, many of whom have been elected to the prestigious American College of Trust and Estate Counsel (ACTEC), are experienced in the areas of estate planning and administration; estate, income and gift tax; trust formation and management; executor and trustee services; charitable giving and foundations; special needs planning; probate law and litigation; and residential real estate.

The firm’s attorneys are very knowledgeable about domicile-and residency-based taxation, having offices in US states both with and without income and death taxes. While most of the firm’s clients reside in Connecticut, Florida and New York, it has clients throughout the United States, as well as in 25 countries around the world.

Whether dealing with recently acquired assets or family fortunes that span generations, the firm provides innovative strategies and solutions to preserve, enhance and transition their clients’ wealth, as well as meet their varied legal needs and personal goals.

Cummings & Lockwood leverages sophisticated technology to deliver the highest quality work product more efficiently, thereby allowing for more personalised service to clients. Automated technology platforms enable private clients attorneys to devote more time to counselling clients, as well as to structuring sophisticated estate planning documents that are tailored to their clients’ specific needs.

The firm’s proprietary document drafting and estate practice systems enable it to produce state-of-the-art estate planning documents that have been custom-designed by Cummings & Lockwood’s trusts and estates attorneys, as opposed to using off-the-shelf legal documents that are more generic in nature. These systems allow attorneys to quickly update the firm’s estate planning documents to ensure that they reflect the most recent legislative developments and case law, as well as provide flexible tools for tracking the estate planning process for all of its clients. Finally, the estate practice system provides a sophisticated framework for the administration of trust and estate settlements, ensuring a thorough monitoring of trust income, principal, distributions, disbursements and accountings.

Commercial Practice:
Cummings & Lockwood has an elite commercial practice with numerous, professionally-recognised lawyers who are experienced in the areas of litigation and dispute resolution; real estate investment and development; banking, lending and credit transactions; corporate acquisitions and divestitures; and partnership, limited liability company and tax matters. The firm’s clients include entrepreneurs, closely-held companies, regional, national and international corporations, hedge funds, private equity firms, financial institutions and not-for-profit organisations. In addition, Cummings & Lockwood’s commercial and private clients lawyers regularly work together to provide entity planning, business succession planning, tax guidance and litigation to privately-owned businesses of all sizes and industries.