Gary Botwinick, Co-Managing Partner, Einhorn, Barbarito, Frost, Botwinick, Nunn & Musmanno, PC
The move back to the office setting and the leveraging of AI tools for improved efficiency are among the main trends having the biggest impact on the legal profession. In an interview with Invest:, Gary Botwinick, co-managing partner at Einhorn, Barbarito, Frost, Botwinick, Nunn & Musmanno PC, highlighted changes in the estate planning legal space and larger trends affecting the profession at large.
What changes in the past year have most impacted the firm’s operations?
We have grown quite a bit and added several attorneys to our office, to the point where we have now decided to move to a different space. This is a big project for us. We are talking about 50% more space than we already have, which is exciting. We have also seen our client base grow considerably in various areas, including trust and estate, family law, and personal injury.
What is the firm’s differentiator among its peers?
In the trust and estates department, we are competing against the New York law firms. Whereas people would go to New York to get some of this work done, they are finding that they can do it here more affordably, with an equal or better product and at a better price. Our other differentiators are that in every other area that we practice, the leaders of those departments are influencers in the community. They are the go-to resources, mentors, and thought leaders in their various areas of practice. This has given our firm a bigger footprint. We are known throughout the state by the quality of the work that we are producing and the fact that we can handle some of the most unique matters that may present themselves.
What trends have you identified overall for the New Jersey legal landscape?
The biggest shift is the shift to remote work, which is now shifting back to in-office. There is a greater demand in the industry for the return to the office. Certainly, for younger attorneys, they must be in the office so they can be properly mentored. Also, for the camaraderie and to provide our clients with the best collaborative and positive results, it is important that we see each other regularly. The other great shift is the use of AI and the extent to which we are incorporating that into the work that we are doing. It is in its infancy. It has wonderful benefits; however, it is not a substitute for thorough legal research, work, and analysis. It is a tool that we are using primarily as a jumping off point, and as a way of consolidating ideas and organizing our work product. I suspect that in the next decade, it will become a bigger and bigger part of the legal work that we do.
What client demand shifts have you noticed in the trust and estate practice?
The past 18 months have been quite interesting because the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act had many provisions that were sunsetting, and we did not know what was going to happen with that until we started to get wind of the Big Beautiful Bill Act, which was finally signed at the beginning of July. We now have certainty as to what will happen to estate and gift tax exemption and various income tax changes. This has been a key issue in the past 18 months. Another issue is that clients’ wealth has been increasing, and with that comes a greater need for sophisticated estate planning. Since the pandemic, we have noticed a greater need for carefully crafted instruments, especially trust agreements that relate to dealing with our clients’ children, many of whom might have questions on how to handle money, or mental health issues, and the like. Clients want to ensure that we design plans which protect their inheritances from what might otherwise be a situation where it can be squandered, or where the beneficiaries may not have the skillset required to manage a significant portfolio. We have seen more and more younger clients who have been successful in their businesses, who need value-added services so that they can get ahead of any estate tax problems they may foresee in the future.
We also frequently deal with estate planning in second marriages and the complexities that come along with those relationships. This means that we are representing clients in connection with more prenuptial agreements than ever before. As first marriages are occurring later in life, the spouses are often coming together after having developed a business or a sizable portfolio, and they are far more interested in protecting their premarital assets than might have been the case a few years ago.
In what ways have broader economic changes impacted your practice?
Certainly, interest rates have impacted our business. To some extent, the tariff situation has impacted our business as well. Political uncertainty has had an impact on our business. The fact that there seems to be some stagnation in D.C. affects our business. The state’s economy has also impacted our business. I deal with many business owners, and many of them are concerned about the tax rates in New Jersey. A key issue we see in the estate planning practice is that many of our clients are moving to more favorable jurisdictions, primarily along the Sun Belt. Clients who have been legacy clients for many years are now moving out of New Jersey. We also see more geographically divided families, where parents and children live in different states, so when we do multigenerational planning, we need to be mindful of this. And, of course, as the stock market continues to see new highs, this has increased the wealth of many of our clients. This means greater needs for sophisticated tax and estate planning advice.
What is the firm’s approach toward recruiting and talent development?
We generally have not had problems finding talent in most areas. But the desire for remote work means that we have had to work harder to find employees who understand how important it is for them to primarily work in our offices. We are all ambassadors of the firm, and we all act as headhunters and recruiters. We generally do not use recruiters because we find that we have attracted the best talent by identifying attorneys who are good at their job and with whom we have worked on matters. We would like to think that our reputation for being a positive workplace has allowed us to attract talented attorneys who may have been trained elsewhere and who have experience under their belt.
As far as attracting first-year and second-year attorneys, we have done a good job as well, but it takes work. We work with the law schools and use that as a tool to identify the candidates who are well-rounded and who have the eagerness to specialize in a particular area. We look for people who show interest in a particular area of the law and who have gone above and beyond just taking a few classes in law school.
What are the top priorities for the firm in the near future?
We want more collaboration among our attorneys so that we can get back to where we were before COVID. We want to use technology in a way that makes us more efficient and which serves the needs of our clients. We will continue to focus on developing less experienced attorneys on what it means to be a well-rounded attorney. It means doing more than working on client matters and billing your hours. It means making yourself a leader in the bar, which means being more involved in events, writing articles, and finding a niche in your particular area of the law where you can get a level of expertise that most attorneys practicing in that area of the law may not have. This is where I would like to see us grow in the coming years.
