Christopher Weld quoted in article on business opportunities increasingly flowing to mid-size law firms
Christopher Weld Jr. was quoted in a Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly news article concerning a trend of mid-size law firms increasingly obtaining business from corporate clients that was previously done by much larger firms.
Mr. Weld indicated that mid-size firms are more cost-effective in handling litigation not involving high-stakes damages or the future of a company.
“If you have a $1.5 million to $2 million piece of litigation, you’re going to pay a big firm over a million bucks to do that, which is kind of hard to justify,” he told the publication.
Mr. Weld, managing partner of Todd & Weld, said overstaffing is a fundamental problem for big firms in controlling costs.
“We tend to be a lot less top-down than the big firms,” he said. “At a big firm you’ll get a senior partner, a junior partner, a senior level-associate, a junior-level associate and a paralegal assigned to a case. So a two-hour meeting is a $5,000 or $10,000 affair.”
He said he envisions some large firms eventually realizing that their infrastructure is too big to handle a client’s small- to mid-level cases in a cost-effective manner. The result, he said, could be more partnering arrangements in which attorneys at large firms hand off work to trusted attorneys at smaller firms.
“When they look in the mirror and conclude they don’t want to handle those cases, the question becomes, ‘Where can I put the case so I don’t have a risk that the person is going to steal my client?’”
Mr. Weld is a Founding Partner of the firm. He has over 30 years of experience in commercial litigation, arbitration and dispute resolution in cases generally involving business disputes with vigorously contested issues of substantial value.