🔒From cannabis to mediation – law firms expand practices to meet growing demand

For Pullman & Comley, business is smoking. The cannabis business that is.

Connecticut’s legalization of recreational marijuana has been a boon for the law firm, Managing Partner Lee Hoffman said.

The firm has offices in Bridgeport, Hartford, Westport and Waterbury, as well as Rhode Island and New York state,

Pullman & Comley is aiming to position itself as one of the state’s go-to firms for the emerging legal marijuana industry, with eight attorneys devoted to cannabis work, Hoffman said. That work ranges from handling land use matters to creation of LLCs to helping clients with permits for cannabis growth and distribution, Hoffman said. One of the firm’s attorneys earned the Connecticut Cannabis Chamber of Commerce’s Lawyer of the Year Award, he proudly noted.

“It was interesting when Connecticut legalized medical marijuana,” Hoffman said. “First we had to deal with those issues as a legal community, and with recreational, issues have just multiplied.”

Legal marijuana is just one of the areas identified by law firms contacted by New Haven Biz as major sources of growth for their practices. Others include energy – especially alternative energy – startups and business development, mediation and intellectual property. Old standbys like labor and healthcare law are also showing an upward swing, they said.

Richard L. Street, managing partner of the Carmody Torrance Sandak & Hennessey LLP law firm, said New Haven’s booming biotech sector has given his practice a big boost. It’s not just Yale-related companies, Street said. The city has earned a reputation as a great place for young entrepreneurs to move to and start a business, thanks to its relatively low rents and plethora of entertainment, cultural and restaurant options, he said.

“There are people coming to New Haven because it’s known for biotech,” said Street, whose firm has offices in New Haven, Waterbury and Stamford. “It started with Yale. Now it’s taking off on its own. VC (venture capital) money is available. It's a pretty interesting time in New Haven.”

Carmody provides fledgling firms with everything – from legal documents to create a company, to assistance with visas for foreign workers, to help complying with employment and labor law, Street said. Immigration law related to visas has been a particular source of growth, he said.

“We can offer a full suite of services to support them and advise them through the startup process, which can be challenging,” he said.

The bonanza in biotech is helping fuel another growth area for Carmody, in intellectual property, Street said. Firms, especially in the tech sector, are increasingly keen to protect their creations, he said. For tech firms, that includes not only code but things like a website’s look and feel, according to Street.

“In this digital age, it’s become crucial to businesses to protect their IT,” Street said.

Another area of growth for the firm is work related to blockchain technology — for example an entrepreneur looking to try to replace traditional municipal land records kept in a town hall vault with a blockchain-based system, Street said.

“This is cutting-edge stuff that people are still figuring out,” he said.

New Haven’s construction surge — apartments continue to rise at breakneck speed — has also been a significant source of increased business for Carmody, Street said.

For Barclay Damon, a large regional firm with an office in New Haven, the biggest boost in business is coming from the energy sector, said Lizz Acee, managing director of major market offices in New York, Boston, Washington D.C., and New Jersey as well as New Haven.

Helping drive growth in that practice area is the expansion in renewables, Acee said.

“It can be anything from a major solar or wind project to regulatory issues and environmental issues,” she said.

Barclay Damon is also seeing an uptick in business restructurings and workouts as well as bank litigation, Acee said. Echoing Street and Hoffman, she cited intellectual property law and cannabis as growth areas.

Acee noted that Barclay Damon has something of an unusual structure. Instead of traditional practice areas, it has teams that focus on a given economic sector and then provide clients with all legal services related to it. In recent years, the firm created a new team focused on restaurants and hotels and another it dubbed the “outdoor and wildlife team,” she said.

The latter team has seen its work increase significantly, Acee said. Clients range from land conservancies, to a bow maker defending a patent, to property owners coping with the Endangered Species Act, to wildlife museums seeking accreditation.

The firm created the restaurant and hotel team, Acee said, when it saw new opportunities in the industry.

The pandemic and its lingering aftermath have affected different practice areas in different ways, representatives of all three firms said. Commercial and retail real estate have both suffered and continue to struggle, they said. Litigation also took a hit thanks to COVID-related court closures, although it is coming back, they said.

The virus did provide a big boost to one practice area, according to Pullman & Comley’s Hoffman: arbitration and mediation. Temporary court closures resulted in a big backlog that lingers to this day. More clients are turning to alternative means to settle their disagreements, Hoffman said.

“Instead of going to court, parties will seek to mediate or arbitrate their disputes privately,” Hoffman said.

That has translated into a big uptick in mediation and arbitration work for his firm, he said. Pullman recently hired two more retired judges, giving it a total of five, to help handle the growing caseload, he said.

Hoffman added that the pandemic has led to a major change in the practice of law. He has more clients he has never met face-to-face because so much more legal business – everything from conferences to consultations – is being conducted over Zoom or Microsoft Teams.

Certain court proceedings have moved online as well, he said. In addition, state agencies began holding hearings online and made it easier to obtain permits and conduct other business remotely, Hoffman said.

As the pandemic has receded, these changes have remained and are increasingly entrenched as the normal course of business, he said.

“I think it’s here to stay because it’s just more convenient for every party,” Hoffman said.