Questions…
In many ways, we combine the best aspects of independent consultancy with the best aspects of a traditional law firm.
One of the biggest advantages of our model is that we are extremely lean, meaning that our full-equity partners can keep beyond 85% of their fees (much higher than the large consultancy platforms and with cleaner tax treatment) and our consultants can retain 80% of their fees.
Our partners have no need to administer a personal services company and in many ways we think of our partnership model as the next stage in the evolution of independent practice.
Another big difference with the consultancy platforms is that our full equity partners are partners in our business, part and parcel of our organisation, an contribute to our strategic decision making, helping us to shape and improve the next generation law firm.
A major benefit for all our lawyers is that we are also carefully and deliberately building a City practice with an elite brand – a community of people with exceptional backgrounds who want to play a role in building a new model of City law firm.
Most importantly, we offer our lawyers what we call “fully supported independence”; an initiative to take as much of the risk as possible out of independent practice. We guarantee regular opportunities to pitch to clients, we can provide access to supporting lawyers and paralegals of all levels and areas of expertise, we provide access to cutting edge legal technologies and know-how resources and we can finance invoices, if our partners want us to.
We also encourage our lawyers to build their own teams and to develop a technology offering for their clients, effectively building their own scalable business from within our firm.
One of the many benefits of Clearlake is that our ownership structure incentivises us to invest in items such as business development and legal technologies on our partners’ behalf.
We can guarantee to bring regular client opportunities to our lawyers, with no upfront investment required by them. Where a lawyer decides to take on the clients we introduce, a small internal referral fee is payable by that partner, meaning that partners only pay for our business development services if they benefit from them.
Over time, as our firm grows in scale, we obviously anticipate more internal referrals between our lawyers, but our marketing and business development team is more than capable of bringing in regular work opportunities for all of our lawyers.
For those who join our consultancy path, not at all. Our consultants are free to practice on other consultancy platforms or as partners in other fee retention firms.
For those who choose to join our unique, full equity partnership, yes, we expect them to work with Clearlake exclusively (although not to the exclusion of other non-law pursuits), as they will be joining our team to help us build the next generation of law firm.
By providing dual-track career paths, we are able to cater flexibly to the needs of each individual lawyer.
We have absolutely no billing targets and we never will.
Our equity partners are simply required to cover their modest share of our carefully controlled central costs. Beyond that, they work as little or as much as they like.
Some will choose to grow scalable practices continuing to bring in clients, hiring juniors and distributing our client-facing technology offerings.
Others prefer a simple part-time practice allowing them to balance their professional commitments with other obligations in their lives.
Our firm is deliberately built to cater for any working pattern, with the only condition that our lawyers are of an excellent calibre and are kind and respectful people.
We have a central office hub in London, just off Holborn Circus, which is hosted in The Clubhouse at 20 St Andrew Street, EC4A 3AG.
Our lawyers are welcome to take additional memberships or private offices at our HQ, or lease serviced office space anywhere that suits them. Otherwise, they may simply work from their home office or on-site with their clients.
The whole philosophy of Clearlake is to set our lawyers free to work in a way that suits them and their practice.
The firm also has a relationship with the IWG Group (Regus, SPACES etc), so we can arrange office space or memberships for each of our lawyers at any of IWG’s thousands of locations worldwide, where helpful.
