Attorney Leonard Kopelman, whose 60-member Boston-based municipal-law firm has been nominated to replace City Solicitor Linda Lowe, conceded that, by himself, “I don’t know that I could do a better job.”

Saying, “I do not have an ax to grind with the legal department,” Mayor Carolyn Kirk made much the same point about her decision, the most dramatic so far in her three weeks in office.

But Kirk also said, “We need a new way of thinking about some of these old problems.”

Those old problems include employee personnel claims such as the embarrassing standoff with police officer Steven Lamberis that kept Lamberis on nearly permanent paid leave and finally was settled last year at a cost to the city of about $175,000; suits by unions and real estate developers; financially debilitating federal and environmental mandates; the city’s inability to gain legal control of its harborfront; and seemingly intractable disputes over sewer betterment subsidies.

In Kirk’s view, the old way of thinking was to pile all of it high on Lowe’s desk and hope for the best despite the odds.

The thinking by the city’s new mayor — which parallels the thinking of more than a third of the cities and towns in Massachusetts — is to arm Gloucester with outsourced legal talent from Kopelman and Paige in quantity and quality sufficient for mobilization as problems arise, to train the city’s work force in problem avoidance, and to give Gloucester a fighting chance in this era of legal specialization.

The legal department move was part of Kirk’s proposed reorganization of city government, announced in a special message to the council Monday. The plan includes many other appointments and staff changes. The entire package must go to the council for review and approval.

Kopelman promises the legal work, billed at $150 an hour, with no retainer, will be better and cheaper than the $230,000 Gloucester paid last year for legal work.

That sum included Lowe’s $77,752 salary, not including health insurance and benefits; the $52,350 the city paid Suzanne Egan as a .87 of a full-time assistant solicitor; and the $44,928 paid to an executive secretary. Those figures do not include fringe benefits.

Avoiding these expenses in the deal with Kopelman is another way for the city to reduce immediate and eventual costs.

The mayor of Newburyport said he wasn’t sure Kopelman and Paige was saving his city money on the legal front, but he had no doubt the city to Gloucester’s north was getting superior legal representation.

“Saving money? It’s hard to tell,” said Newburyport Mayor John Moak. “Some years, we get hit really hard with attorneys fees on cases.”

But Moak said Kopelman and Paige, which has been employed as outsourced counsel for the last four years, has been invaluable, “especially on big issues.” He said the business model that Kopelman has innovated and sold to towns, including 13 in Essex County, and small cities is well suited for the times. “We are a society of specialists,” Moak said.

Kopelman came out of Harvard Law School in the 1960s, became a Brookline Town Meeting member, worked for a white-shoe Boston firm, found himself with a yen for municipal law — and saw the benefits of creating a firm with multiple specialists, with economies of scale that could be brought to bear anywhere.

“You don’t have to re-create the wheel,” Kopelman said. He staffed his firm with young lawyers, stayed away from prestige leases, and began winning the business of cities and towns.

The billing rate and salary scale at Kopelman and Paige pale in comparison to the $400 to $600 per hour now charged by Boston’s big names, such Nutter McClennen and Fish, which are representing clients regularly now in Gloucester.

Not everyone, however, is convinced that Kirk’s idea of outsourcing the legal department to Kopelman and his staff is suited to Gloucester. Now practicing law on Middle Street, James McKenna, who was Mayor John Bell’s chief administrative aide through the first two of Bell’s three terms, said he worries about the absence of a lawyer integrated into the sinew of the city.

“For an $80-million (municipal) corporation (Gloucester) not to have a legal staff on the ground and available to discuss anything, day-to-day business, is disturbing,” said McKenna, whose clients include DeMoulas, the supermarket chain that’s deep in negotiations with the city over the placement of a Market Basket in West Gloucester.

Mark Nestor, an attorney who leads an educational advocacy group and represented a successful Magnolia homeowners insurgency against redevelopment of a rest home into an assisted living facility, worries about access to Kopelman and Paige, but agrees that the switch to the firm’s multiple experts “could be good.”

Newburyport Mayor Moak said he felt the off-site relationship with Kopelman and Paige did leave a void. “You lose some intimacy and pick up expertise,” he said.

Moak said he filled it by having the firm hold regular hours in City Hall. Kirk said she will likely do the same, but Kopelman said there was a risk of his firm’s becoming a crutch.

“If we’re around too much, it’s not too good either,” he said. “Some questions don’t need to be answered.”

At the start of his first term, Mayor Bell briefly considered Kopelman and Paige, but the direct line to Kirk’s decision — announced Monday — can be traced to Councilor Michael McLeod during the revelations in 2007 that the city for more than a year had been paying Patrolman Stephen Lamberis for not working while trying to extricate itself from a web of legal claims and counterclaims.

Running for mayor at the time, McLeod drew on the expertise of his friend, attorney Terry Segal, who had known Kopelman for years.

“She asked about (the Kopelman option) the day after the election,” said McLeod of Kirk. “She researched it. She said, ‘We can’t just respond, we need to get in front.’”