Cummings & Lockwood LLC

Focus and practice areas

The firm traces its start to 1909, when Homer Cummings and Charles Lockwood founded it. Its legal name is Cummings & Lockwood LLC. The work covers four broad fields: trusts and estates, corporate and finance, litigation and arbitration, and commercial and residential real estate. It advises individuals, families, family offices, closely held businesses, charitable entities and other commercial enterprises.

Within those four fields the firm names several defined practices. On the personal side these include Wills, Trusts and Estate Planning, Probate and Estate Administration, and Trusts and Estates Litigation. On the business side they include Mergers and Acquisitions, Business and Commercial Litigation, and Commercial and Residential Real Estate. That split between personal wealth work and commercial work runs through much of what the firm does.

What the private clients group handles

This group covers the full arc of estate work. Its lawyers handle estate planning and administration, estate, income and gift tax, trust formation and management, executor and trustee services, charitable giving, and probate. As a reviewer, I read that as a full-cycle offering: the same firm can draft a will and later carry the estate through probate.

Probate and estate administration follow a set path. An executor or administrator files the will with a probate court, gathers and values the assets, pays debts and taxes, and distributes what remains to the heirs. Firms that offer executor and trustee services can step into those roles directly, which matters when a family wants a neutral party to manage a trust over many years. Cummings & Lockwood lists both trustee services and probate among its offerings.

The commercial and litigation side

Alongside the private client work, the firm runs a business practice. Its commercial lawyers work on litigation, real estate, banking and lending, corporate acquisitions, and partnership and limited liability company matters. The named practices here include Mergers and Acquisitions, Business and Commercial Litigation, and Commercial and Residential Real Estate.

Mergers and acquisitions work usually moves through stages: a letter of intent, due diligence on the target company, drafting and negotiating the purchase agreement, and closing. Business litigation runs on a different clock, through pleadings, discovery, motions and, if a case reaches that point, trial or arbitration. The firm places arbitration under its litigation and arbitration heading, which points to disputes that parties settle outside a courtroom as well as inside one.

The firm's real estate work spans commercial and residential property, and its lawyers also handle banking and lending. Those areas often meet in a single deal, where a property purchase depends on financing from a bank. Partnership and limited liability company matters cover how a business is formed and governed, including the agreements that set out who owns what and who decides what. Corporate acquisitions can involve any of these threads at once.

Who the firm advises

The client list runs across personal and institutional lines. On the personal side the firm names individuals, families and family offices. A family office is a private group set up to manage the wealth and affairs of a single family, often across investments, tax and estate matters. Work of that kind tends to run on for years, since it follows a family's holdings year by year.

On the institutional side the firm lists closely held businesses, charitable entities and other commercial enterprises. Closely held businesses are companies owned by a small number of shareholders, often a founder and relatives, where ownership and management overlap. Charitable entities bring their own rules for formation as a nonprofit and for the tax reporting that follows. The firm's charitable giving work sits next to its estate planning, which fits, since many families plan charitable gifts as part of their wider estate.

Offices and reach

The firm keeps six offices. Three are in Connecticut, in Stamford, Greenwich and West Hartford. Three are in Florida, in Naples, Bonita Springs and Palm Beach Gardens. That footprint lines up with where the firm says many of its clients live, in Connecticut, New York and Florida.

Reach extends past those two states. The firm reports clients in nearly all 50 US states and in more than 20 countries. That spread fits a trusts and estates practice, since families with property or heirs in several states often need counsel who can coordinate across them. The firm counts more than 200 attorneys, fiduciary accountants, paralegals and staff across the six offices.

The mention of fiduciary accountants on staff is worth noting. Estate and trust administration involves tax filings and formal accountings, and keeping accountants in-house alongside lawyers can hold that work under one roof. For a family managing a trust, that can mean fewer outside firms to coordinate.

What the long history adds

A founding date of 1909 gives the firm more than a century of continuous practice. Longevity of that kind tends to matter most in trusts and estates, where a firm may serve the same family across three or four generations. In my opinion the steadiness of that record is the clearest signal in the firm's profile. The founders' names still form the firm's name, a common trait in older firms where the original partners are long gone. The firm has grown to more than 200 people while keeping its base in Connecticut, where it began.