Thomas Wiegand

An Equally at home on the plaintiff and defense side of civil litigation, Tom brings genuine openness, disciplined foresight, and the kind of hard-won credibility that comes from having argued, tried, and resolved some of the most demanding disputes in the country. His practice covers complex commercial disputes broadly, including class actions, business disputes, and antitrust and securities matters. Tom also has considerable experience in litigating and mediating probate, trust and estate matters. The range of parties he has represented, from foreign governments and institutional defendants to individual claimants, class members, and attorneys, gives him a commanding read on how disputes look from every seat at the table.

Tom started his legal career working directly alongside his early mentor, Professor Roger Fisher, author of Getting to Yes. Tom was Roger’s substantive assistant for two years, working both at the Harvard Negotiation Project, a theory think tank, and at Roger’s for-profit consulting firm. The experience was beyond broad: the two traveled to South Africa and met with many constituencies during the days of apartheid, helped avoid a teacher’s union strike, and trained corporate executives. Through these formative years, Tom gained an early command of negotiation principles that has informed his approach at the table ever since.

Tom next embarked on a long career as a litigator and trial lawyer that provided a deep education on both sides of the “v.” Tom spent more than twenty years at Winston & Strawn LLP, where he handled complex civil defense matters for major institutional clients across business disputes, consumer finance, and securities and consumer class actions. He then joined MoloLamken LLP, one of the country’s premier litigation boutiques, where his practice broadened to include plaintiff-side and appellate work. Tom has represented classes, opt-outs, institutional defendants, foreign governments, and individual parties in matters involving securities fraud, antitrust, RICO, consumer finance, MDL proceedings, and trust and estate claims, developing the kind of representative range and legal mastery that makes it difficult to surprise him and easy for parties on all sides to trust that he understands their position from the inside.

In recent years, Tom also maintained an active mediation practice alongside his litigation work, mediating over 50 disputes across a breadth of commercial matters. Tom also sits as an arbitrator, is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, and is an Adjunct Professor in ADR at the University of Illinois College of Law. He has written on the case for earlier mediation engagement and authored work on mediation preparation, bringing a practitioner’s eye to a subject he has studied and practiced for the better part of his career.

Tom’s approach is grounded in the conviction that flexibility is not a style preference but a method. He enters every session knowing the parties’ submissions in depth and curious about what he does not yet understand. He does not start with a predetermined path to resolution. He absorbs each party’s account of the dispute as rich information that can shape his thinking, rather than as positions to be managed toward a conclusion he’s already reached. He opens by creating genuine space for engagement, giving parties his full attention when they speak and listening not just for stated positions but for the nuance in how each side frames its story. When parties are far apart, he works patiently to identify the core interests on each side and build from that foundation outward, cutting through to the substance of a dispute rather than managing the gap from the outside in. When cases lose momentum, Tom grounds parties in the realities of their situation, speaking with compassionate candor about litigation risk, the costs of continued conflict, and what resolution actually requires of each side. He does not consider the work done until both parties have reached an agreement they can sustain long after they leave the mediation table.

Now at Signature Resolution, Tom offers parties the product of a career spent learning how disputes are won, lost, and ultimately resolved: a neutral with the litigation depth to assess a case from every angle, the principled foundation to keep the process honest, and the persistence to see it through to a resolution that holds.