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FROM THE FOUNDER
You need the right attorney
W hen it comes to the need for an attorney for your AEC business, I tell my entrepreneurship students the same thing I tell firm principals – find someone who is specialized in the issue you need help with. The right attorney with specialized expertise can save AEC firms significant costs, mitigate risks, and protect their business.
Not all attorneys are equal – it’s just like architects and engineers. You wouldn’t hire a structural engineer for a high-rise project who had only done bridges. And you wouldn’t hire an architect to design an elementary school who had only done strip malls. But don’t think there aren’t plenty of attorneys out there who won’t take your work even if they have no experience in that problem. Getting the right attorney on board can be extremely valuable to you. For example, don’t sign any lease without running it past an attorney who knows what they are looking at. I will never forget how years ago we had a new lease to sign for a larger office space in the mixed-use complex we were already leasing space in for our Natick, Massachusetts, office. I took it to our attorney, a wizened old New Yorker who spent 20 years as in-house counsel for an office developer. He told me to grab a tape measure and meet him at the new space. The lease was for 10,000 square feet of space
at about $25 per square foot. What we found was the space actually only 8,800 square feet. In less than an hour, our attorney saved us roughly $180,000 – 1,200 square feet less, at $25 per square foot, over six years. The same scenario was repeated here in Fayetteville years later. When I came back to Zweig White after the lender took the company from its private equity owners a year earlier, we relocated the business to Fayetteville. The lesson learned in Massachusetts was not forgotten. Again, we started in a smaller space in a multi-tenant building that we quickly outgrew. Our landlord had a (supposedly) 3,600-square- foot space we could expand into. So I had a young intern architect who worked for my other business, a design/build/development company, put the floor plan we were provided by the owner into AutoCAD where it turned out to be only 2,700 square feet.
Mark Zweig
See MARK ZWEIG, page 6
THE ZWEIG LETTER SEPTEMBER 22, 2025, ISSUE 1602
ELEVATE THE INDUSTRY®
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