Emma Cleveland and Andrew Goldstein are the chief executive and managing director in the Asia-Pacific region, respectively, of Cleveland & Co, a boutique law firm in the financial services industry. Speaking recently on The Corporate Counsel Show, the pair discussed opening a firm that balances between in-house BigLaw and NewLaw.

Ms Cleveland started the firm in 2012 after seeing an opportunity and gap in the legal market – and opened an Australian office late last year. Ten years on, she said that their market intelligence is “very, very high” and that they have “completely integrated” with their clients.

“When we are working on a project, I work directly with the CFO, the portfolio manager, whoever it is to get the deal done, and everyone in the team is like that. Plus, we don’t allocate; we operate as a team, we’re not seconding or allocating one staff member to one client. So, everyone in our team is working across multiple clients, and we are getting that on-the-ground knowledge of how these firms work. So, our market intelligence now means that we can really hit the ground running really quickly,” she explained.

“So, we are all working on multiple clients every single day, and we don’t know because of the way that we operate, we are effectively offering that trusted advisor, GC service as well. So, a lot of us sit in on partner meetings, board meetings, and we contribute to the strategy of the business. And that is where it’s really exciting in terms of our market intelligence as well.”

This market intelligence, in part, comes from being set within a niche of financial services, something which Ms Cleveland said the firm wants to maintain for years to come.

“I think we saw it in the investment management space; investment management firms used to be a one-stop shop and trying to do everything. And over the last 15, 20 years, they’ve been trying to hive off those areas of the business, so they can focus on their core skills. And I do believe that that gives us an advantage if we focus and we continue to deliver excellent service and we are specialists, known specialists in this space,” she said.

“We can continue to offer that unique service, which is that insight into industry. In the UK, we are the legal team for five industry associations, including the investment association. I sit in on meetings with the Bank of England and treasury and FCA, and so that is what we want to achieve in each region that we operate in.”

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Mr Goldstein became managing director in the Asia-Pacific region for the firm late last year – and part of his role moving forward will be to help grow the business in Australia and become known specialists in the market.

“What we are really looking to do is to supplement that in-house lens, which, as Emma was talking about before, it’s much more about market intelligence, and it’s much more about risk appetite. It’s not really pouring through the High Court transcript for that little gem piece and changing the constitution. It’s really working day to day with people getting things done, applying a legal risk management framework over things and working with clients,” he said.

“So, while I say we’re on the frontier between NewLaw and BigLaw, we are not trying to become BigLaw ourselves, and we are not trying to do that; it’s not what we’re aspiring to do. We want to stay in that innovative space where we are that external in-house counsel and we fulfil that role and we fulfil it really well. So that’s that frontier line there.

“And then in terms of how do we attract clients and how do we manage that space with our existing clients, we’ve got some clients who are already in multiple jurisdictions, we’ve got some clients who are based in London, but wanting to do work here, we’ve got some clients here who are wanting to do some work overseas. So, there’s already some synergies, and we are looking to support some of those existing clients by having this jurisdictional expertise in Australia now to complement what we’ve got already.”

Particularly as the legal market has evolved so much over the course of the pandemic, these kinds of firm models are becoming increasingly popular.

“Even as an in-house practitioner, I didn’t necessarily sit right next to my clients that often. I didn’t sit face to face all the time; they were blissfully unaware of where I was sitting. So, I think we can absolutely do that by providing a Cleveland & Co service; we can do it in a very agile way. We can do it remotely most of the time. We think that the model is going to be attractive for clients because we’re going to do a very good in-house legal service for them,” Mr Goldstein added.

“And we think it’s going to be attractive for lawyers as well because we’re not on the same path as the BigLaw firms; we’re on a different trajectory. We are aiming to have offices in Sydney, London, and the U.S., and we are hoping our lawyers can revolve through those jurisdictions quite comfortably. Financial services and funds is pretty conducive to it because some of the contracts that we worked on are pretty standard between Sydney and London, investment management agreements, derivatives, those sorts of things. It really is one industry globally; even though there are regional differences in the laws, it really is one industry.”

In terms of having a business model across different practice areas and verticals, Ms Cleveland said there were a number of opportunities across the profession for Cleveland & Co.

“We were first to market with this model, and in some jurisdictions, we are still the only player. So, I think that it works really well, and we’ve got proof of concept on our business, right. And other people will slowly see that and try to replicate. And I do think that it provides a solution to a lot of what GCs working in-house are calling for. There’s a lot of calls for dropping the hourly rates and moving away from traditional legal services. And there’s also calls for accountability from the lawyers that they’re working with. And part of what we offer as being their in-house legal team is we are accountable,” she said.

“We don’t give them 10 pages of pros and cons and things like that and you make the decision. We say, ‘Yes,’ or we say, ‘Not like that, but you can do it like this’. And I think there’s a call in the market for that type of legal service as well. And I think that there’s a certain culture that needs to be developed in a business to be able to provide that accountable advice, which I think is a huge opportunity for the profession and firms in general. But I think it’s going to take a lot of cultural change to get there.”

And, particularly as the Australian legal profession continues to evolve post-pandemic, Mr Goldstein added that he’s excited about the future of the firm.

“I think we are here at a really good time. I think that we’re in a wonderful position to jump into the market, get ourselves some really good clients who are really going to benefit from what we are doing,” he said.

“I’m really excited about that. I’m really looking forward to working with those clients and also looking forward to recruiting some really excellent lawyers and having them as part of our team because I think we can offer them something really interesting and really special as well. I think we are at a very exciting time on that frontier. And I think the time is really ripe for us.”

The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Emma Cleveland and Andrew Goldstein, click below: 

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