Spotlight On: Thomas Wallrich, Office Managing Partner – Minneapolis, Cozen O’Connor

Spotlight On: Thomas Wallrich, Office Managing Partner – Minneapolis, Cozen O’Connor

2022-12-28T15:21:14-05:00October 11th, 2022|Legal Services, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Spotlight On|

2 min read October 2022 Cozen O’Connor is a full-service firm with nationally recognized practices in litigation, business law and government relations. Invest: spoke to Office Managing Partner Thomas Wallrich about changes for the firm over the past year, the evolution of business in the region and his outlook for the firm. “We’re going to continue to be opportunistic in terms of growth,” he said.

How has your firm changed in the past year?

During the pandemic, the labor force became detached from the means of production. Technology came in and filled that gap. For the 32 years that I’ve been practicing law, we went to the office, worked at our desk for 16 hours and then went home. The flexibility that came from the hybrid process that emerged from the pandemic allowed more efficiencies and more time to deal directly with our clients. At our firm, we never had an official policy that lawyers had to be in the office, but we did have the flexibility that allowed us to deal with our staff in a way that allowed them to be partially hybridized. That’s where we’re at right now. We’re three days in, two days out when it comes to our staff. It’s been successful.

Is there anything unique about how business is done in Minneapolis-St. Paul?

I was born in St. Paul and educated at the University of Minnesota. I love the market. It’s invested heavily in education and we have a highly educated population consistently between Minneapolis and St. Paul. What you get from that are good workers. We are home to 23 Fortune 500 companies that started here and maintain an office here. There are a lot of big companies here. What has happened in the last 20 years that’s different is that the national firms started to pay attention to that. We used to have large regional firms. Then we started to see national firms coming in. 

As a result, the legal market and the clients have gotten so sophisticated that you have to have solutions immediately no matter where they pop up. The biggest change that I’ve seen over my 30-plus years is that the firms have gotten so much larger and that’s because they have to carry the resources and the overhead to deal with providing solutions. When I started to see the national firms come in, my clients started to feel the demand for those kinds of services and that’s been beneficial for my clients and the firm. With the growth and the size of all of our Fortune 500 companies, we needed more resources to deal with this growth and we needed to become more comfortable with it. It was nice to bring those resources to my clients here and also to the market. 

What is your outlook for the next couple of years and what are your priorities or objectives?

We’re going to continue to be opportunistic in terms of growth. We are not in a rush to get to a certain number of lawyers. I see growth in our public strategies practice and our state attorneys general practice. I don’t see M&A and private equity dying. As the stock market continues to see high interest rates, it tends to create more opportunities for private equity because people are not inclined to continue to get hit by X percent a day on Wall Street. I don’t see real estate dying, but we see financing getting more difficult. For example, if you were to do a billion-dollar building acquisition in New York, you used to put out a bid to lenders who would want to provide financing for that transaction and you might get 20 responses, with all of them fighting to get the deal done. Now, it’s five. It hasn’t turned off as it did in the late 1980s or in 2008 when the market just died for a while. Right now, it’s just slowing and it’s accepting the effects of inflation and higher interest rates. Real estate is particularly sensitive to that.

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https://www.cozen.com/ 

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