Gary R. Botwinick, left, and Patricia M. Barbarito, right, of Einhorn, Harris, Ascher, Barbarito & Frost.

Einhorn, Harris, Ascher, Barbarito & Frost has joined the ranks of law firms using a co-managing partner leadership model, naming tax, trusts and estates practice leader Gary Botwinick to the co-leader role.

Leadership is not new to him, it seems. Longtime managing partner Patricia Barbarito said she has long collaborated on matters of firm leadership with Botwinick, who was approved unanimously by the firm's board of directors and officially took the role as the new year began.

“We've just formalized the relationship,” which more officially “allows us to strategize about the growth of the firm,” Barbarito said in an interview.

“Pat and I communicate about 30 to 50 times a day,” Botwinick said in the same interview. “As the firm has grown, we've had no choice but to formalize certain things.”

That growth has led to a current attorney head count of 33. And with three recent senior partner retirements—Theodore Einhorn, Peter Harris and Michael Ascher—succession planning has become a bigger focus, according to Barbarito, 62, and Botwinick, 52. They declined to give names, but said that upcoming generation of leaders already is positioned at the firm.

Botwinick joined the firm in 1998, making partner three years later. Before that he spent two years at Riker, Danzig, Scherer, Hyland & Perretti, and began his career as an Internal Revenue Service staff counsel in New York.

Barbarito, who has been with the firm for 39 years, chairs the firm's matrimonial practice.

Botwinick said they complement each other—he is “sort of a numbers guy,” while Barbarito is “an astute businessperson who knows how to deal well with people”—and “we each have an ear to the ground in different ways in the firm.”

Barbarito said a co-managing partner model is “an indication of the culture of the firm” being one of collaboration, but also one where firm leaders maintain busy practices. Leadership by a single manager “is not really a style that would fit a more modern-thinking practice,” she added.

Other firms have gone to a co-manager structure. It's been roughly a year since Riker Danzig changed its leadership after two decades, going to a co-managing partner model. Those two roles, along with two executive committee co-chairs, now make up the Morristown firm's four-person leadership structure.

Lance Kalik, who is co-managing partner with Michael O'Donnell, said recently that the year since the change has gone well.

“If your managing partner is going to have a busy practice like Mike and I do, splitting the role is a real asset,” Kalik said in an interview.

It requires some balance: chiefly, knowing what decisions must be made immediately, when perhaps only one co-manager is available, versus those that require the two to confer, he said. “We kind of have the intuitive sense that, if something is important and requires both of us, it has to wait until [we're] available.”

He said that dynamic hasn't led to lags in decision-making, but, as Einhorn Harris attorneys pointed out, communication and trust are key.

“The job requires a commitment of time, but I think the structure we have has eased the burden on everyone,” Kalik said.

Other firms have gone in the other direction. Stark & Stark in Lawrenceville, made up of a plaintiff practice and a business practice, in May 2016 went to a single managing partner model for the first time in nearly two decades. In 2014 it had gone away from the co-managing partner role in favor of a six-person management committee, though that was transitional leading up to Michael Donahue's election as sole managing partner.

Donahue, interviewed last year, told the Law Journal that the transition to a single managing partner had gone well since 2016. Before, certain tasks or implementation of new systems had to be handled duplicatively, or one side of the firm adopted systems that the other didn't, he said.

Now, “there's a point there, rather than a plateau,” which “allows decision-making to be across the firm,” Donahue said in 2018. “It didn't really feel as much like a change … it seemed more like an evolution.”