Emma Cleveland and Andrew Goldstein are the CEO 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 – and what exactly this means in a legal context.

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.

“I was in a global role at that time, and I was looking for someone to fill a gap; my headcount had been cut, my budget had been cut off the back of the financial crisis. It was very difficult for me to get talent that I needed both externally and on a contractor basis. So, I was looking for this model and it didn’t exist,” she said.

“What we do is provide basically the service of an outsourced in-house legal team. We specialise in financial services specifically, and so we’ve built a team of experts in that space. We’re all ex-in-house lawyers, and we come together to offer our team service in the financial services space.”

The firm currently has an office in Sydney and London, 20 staff and close to 200 clients internationally – and Mr Goldstein said that it was easy to draw similarities between the two markets.

“One of the Cleveland & Co areas of focus and interest is really on that funds management space, particularly, and financial services a little bit more broadly, but being a real focus firm on those areas of specialty and the laws that go around them. The laws between London and Sydney are not identical, but with both common law jurisdictions, the funds management industries are substantial and reasonably mature in both markets,” he explained.

“So, it was a pretty easy set of connections to draw that I thought I would be okay with, I’ll be able to continue to do that work quite easily. And so given that we are focusing on funds management, focusing on financial services, that’s a very successful, very big industry here in Australia, the whole superannuation system, that’s really supported the Australian funds management sector very, very substantially. So, it gives us a good place to start here in this jurisdiction.”

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The firm is also looking to open a North American office, which Ms Cleveland said would help “provide a global trading desk-style legal service” – and where the firm already has a few clients.

“The way that we work with our clients is that we become fully integrated with them, we’re on the ground with them delivering work live. And one of the ways we can continue to do that and expand our business is by having offices in different parts of the world. We looked at the market in Asia-Pac[ific], and Australia is the largest financial centre in terms of AUM, between here and New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, so that really drove our decision making. Another factor is that we have corporate objectives that we want to achieve in each region, and we could achieve each of those.

“And we wanted to be able to train people because there’s a great source of candidates here in Australia. There are a lot of law graduates that find it difficult to find positions; there’s not enough positions for the graduates. So, we really think that there’s an opportunity here, particularly to tap into that great talent and really develop them in this space to support Australia in its endeavours to become a large financial centre,” she said.

“It also feeds into one of my other strategies, which is I want to provide true agility to our staff. I want to hire people that are driven; our core values are partnership, intelligence and drive. And for that, you’re looking at citizens, the world type personalities, and by having offices, having our systems set up, which means you can tap into work wherever you are. It means that our staff can basically move between those offices whenever they want.”

In terms of how businesses and other firms engage Cleveland & Co, Mr Goldstein said that the firm helps with both legal roles and other functions.

“It might be sitting on committees, it might be reviewing documents, it might be negotiating deals and those sorts of things. And we extend a little bit into the corporate side, we might be doing minutes or meetings and those sorts of things, we can do some compliance work as well. So, we would do anything that a traditional in-house legal team would do.

“In London, we fulfil an HR legal function as well. So that’s the first type of client where there is no in-house legal team, we are it and we are performing that function for them. We might be working with them for a long period of time and that situation might change over time, it might evolve where over time, we might be accompanying them on the journey of building a legal team, or they might take their first full-blown legal hire. We might give them some advice about that on the way through, and we might continue to have a role with them going forward once they have a legal team,” he said.

“The other type of client that we would look at is something like a large institution that already has an in-house legal team. They might have one or a number of lawyers already working for them and a general counsel and a head of, and a junior and a this and that. In which case, we work with them as an extension of their team.”

This sort of extra help has been particularly vital for many businesses post-pandemic, Mr Goldstein added.

“In-house legal teams have been pretty pressured over the last few years. There’s been a lot of strain, I think, in those teams; I think part of it has been remote working, part of it’s been COVID, part of the uncertainty of it all,” he added.

“And I think employers today can help demonstrate some of the support for their staff and their teams by having a really sensible engagement or retainer with us where we can really help them with that. And we can help resolve some of those really lumpy tasks that they have. And we can dive in with an in-house lens, dive in very quickly and help teams quickly.”

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: