Vincent R. McGuinness, Jr. is president and managing partner of Cozen O’Connor as well as a senior member of the Subrogation & Recovery Department.
In his firm leadership roles, Vince oversees all administrative functions of the firm’s 32 offices, five ancillary businesses, and nearly 1,600 attorneys and staff. His portfolio encompasses responsibility for finances, operations, human resources, facilities, technology, recruitment, and strategic planning. Vince is also broadly in charge of fostering a positive firm culture, from guiding diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives to directing lateral integration programs.
Vince is uniquely well positioned to undertake these diverse tasks, given his long history at Cozen O’Connor. Hired in 1981 as the firm’s 19th lawyer, Vince now has 40 years of institutional knowledge and firmwide friendships to call upon in his day-to-day work. He has been an integral part of all the changes that have occurred within the firm and the legal profession over those decades and continues to seek out new insights and innovations to support the firm’s ongoing development.
In his private subrogation practice, Vince focuses on prosecution of complex property damages claims and has tried more than 30 cases to verdict in state and federal courts across the country. He remains the primary point person and account manager for a number of longstanding insurance clients and stays current in all recovery-related legal trends. He is frequently asked to lecture on subrogation law and is famous for his use of clips from Hollywood movies to illustrate key points in those presentations.
Over the years, Vince has held a number of high-profile positions in legal, philanthropic, and civic organizations. He is currently active with the Philadelphia Bar Association, serving as co-chair of the Large Firm Management Committee. He previously served as chair of the Justice Brennan Distinguished Jurist Award Committee and was a member of the bar association’s Strategic Planning Core Team.
Vince coordinated the firm’s COVID-19 response, and has been involved in multiple COVID-19 response initiatives locally, nationally, and internationally, including: serving on the Philadelphia Bar Association’s COVID Task Force; speaking as a guest lecturer with Tenant-Talks; participating as a panelist with American Heart Association Community Conversations; and as an invited guest speaker at the Osaka Japan Bar Association conference on COVID. For his extraordinary efforts to support the Philadelphia Bar Association and it member firms during the COVID pandemic, Vince and Cozen O’Connor received the organization’s inaugural “Champion of the Bar Award” in 2020. In addition, he was the 11th lawyer named on the 2022 Law Power 100 by City & State Pennsylvania.
Vince is also a member of the Corporate Leadership Council for the National Constitution Center and a Life Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, an honorary society of lawyers and judges limited to 1 percent of the lawyers admitted to practice in the United States. He has been closely involved in the U.S. squash community as well and continues to serve on the boards of SquashSmarts and the Philadelphia Squash Racquets Association (both of which he previously chaired). He is a former board member of Legacy Youth Tennis & Education and US Squash.
Vince earned his Bachelor of Arts from Drew University in 1978 and his law degree from Villanova University in 1981, where he was a member of the Villanova Law Review and authored a comment titled “Insurance Law-Asbestos Duty to Indemnity and to Defend,” which was published in volume 26 of the Villanova Law Review.