Peter Torcicollo Named Next Managing Director of Gibbons PC

On Oct 25, 2021

Newark-based Gibbons P.C. announced that Peter J. Torcicollo has been elected the firm’s next managing director, effective Feb. 1, 2022, when current Chairman and Managing Director Patrick C. Dunican Jr. assumes the position of executive chairperson. Torcicollo currently co-chairs the firm’s Commercial & Criminal Litigation Group.

As managing director, Torcicollo will be chief executive officer of the firm for up to two four-year terms, responsible for overseeing professional and administrative operations, executing the directives of the executive committee, and ensuring that all attorneys, employees, committees, and practice groups perform their roles effectively for the benefit of Gibbons and its clients. He will direct the creation and implementation of a strategic business plan and mission statement, as well as the internal operations required to carry them out. Torcicollo will work closely with heads of the firm’s administrative departments and its General Counsel on matters relating to finance, banking, budgeting, personnel, compensation, technology, marketing, the Rules of Professional Conduct, firm policies and protocols, and general daily operations. He will also be involved in the identification of new business and stewardship of existing business.

“Patrick Dunican’s are big shoes to fill, but I will be committing 100 percent of my focus and effort to the management of this organization, and I am honored that my partners are giving me the opportunity to do so, ” said Torcicollo. “The Gibbons firm has been here nearly 100 years, and I’ve been here nearly 30. It is my firmly held belief that all of us owe it to those lawyers coming up behind us to do everything in our power to guarantee that they all have this firm as a place to call home for the next 30 years, and that the institution is still here another 100 years from now.”

Torcicollo joined Gibbons as an associate in 1993 after earning degrees from Bucknell University and Rutgers School of Law – Newark, leaving for one year to serve as judicial clerk to the Honorable Alfred J. Lechner, Jr., U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey. He was promoted to director in 2000 and became a member of the executive committee in 2010 upon being named chair of what was then the firm’s Business & Commercial Litigation Group. When that group merged with the criminal defense practice in 2018, he became co-chair of the Commercial & Criminal Litigation Group, the firm’s largest and most wide-ranging practice group. He has held numerous other managerial and leadership positions at Gibbons. Torcicollo developed, launched, built, and directed the firm’s construction litigation practice, leading to Gibbons’s ranking by leading industry publication Construction Executive as a nationwide “Top 50 Construction Law Firm” all three years the list has been published. He was the firm’s hiring partner for over 15 years and continues to serve on the Partnership Screening Committee.

Most notably, Torcicollo served as director of professional development, retention, and associate recruitment for over 15 years, playing a key role in the elimination of the firm’s summer associate program in favor of aggressive recruitment of lawyers who had completed judicial clerkships. Today, well over half the firm’s attorneys are former judicial clerks or interns and can provide clients firsthand insight into the practices and preferences of specific judges and solid knowledge of courthouse procedures. Torcicollo was directly involved in the hiring of more than 60 current Gibbons attorneys and indirectly involved in far more.

In his managing director role, Torcicollo will work closely with Dunican, who, as executive chairperson, will focus on many of the more outward-facing platforms for which the two firm leaders will be responsible. They will collaborate to ensure that the firm’s internal and external plans and programs complement each other and together advance its overall strategic plan and mission. Torcicollo will “shadow” Dunican for the next three months, to learn in a hands-on way the scope and requirements of the Managing Director position. Dunican noted, “Pete is everything a managing director should be – smart, strategic, open-minded, ethical, relatable, and, most importantly, completely dedicated to the great Gibbons law firm, its clients, its employees, and its future. Having worked with him in various capacities for decades already, I am excited about what we will be able to accomplish together.”

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