Private Practice

For partners in traditional law firms, the constant politics of profit allocation and jostling for position weighs heavily on working and social relationships.

For senior associates and salaried partners, the pressure to hit billing targets and the sheer volume of work pulls them away from so many other important things in their lives and yet their promotion into the equity is entirely outside of their control.

These are among many of the trends that inspired our development of a new generation of law firm, Clearlake Law.

Clearlake is a unique law firm, carefully designed from the ground up to make being a partner in an enterprise-grade firm an entirely positive experience.

We know that there are often difficult relationships to manage within a traditional law firm and how difficult it can be to avoid those relationships.

We understand how difficult it can be for senior associates and junior partners to get out into the world to find clients of their own and build their own practices given the volume of work they need to get through on a daily basis.

And we hear so many stories of senior associates and junior partners missing their children’s performances or recitals, or not making it for school matches.

At Clearlake, our lawyers have full control over their working lives. They work where they want, when they want and with whom they want from a fully, authorised law firm and cutting edge infrastructure.

Similar to the legal consultancy model, our lawyers also keep what they earn but, importantly, our partners typically retain around 85% of the fees they generate personally (a significantly higher fee retention than the consultancy platforms) whilst joining us as full equity partners in our limited liability partnership (so no clunky personal services companies or double tax hits).

We provide full end-to-end and support, from business development (providing regular client pitching opportunities) right through to invoice finance, helping our partners to build a practice of their own with the types of client they want to work with and in a fully supported way.

Since all of our partners run their own independent practices from within our partnership, they retain the familiar partnership structure, but there are no politics in relation to the allocation of profits, which significantly improves relations between our partners.

Our partners also retain full control over their working lives. There are no more missed recitals or school matches. We believe that in the modern world, senior professionals have the right to a measure of control. We see our model of full independence within a collaborative, elite partnership as the optimal vehicle for a fulfilling career as a private practice lawyer.

We also have absolutely no billing targets, our partners are simply required to cover their modest share of our carefully controlled central costs. Beyond that our partners work as little or as much as they like.

Some choose to grow scalable practices continuing to bring in clients, hiring juniors and retailing our client-facing technology offerings. Others are seeking a simple sole practice allowing them to balance their professional commitments with other obligations in their lives. Our firm is deliberately built to cater for different speeds.

We are carefully bringing together a partnership and a culture, from the ground up, in which excellent City lawyers with big firm backgrounds, who are also good people, come together to share costs and risk, to benefit from an enterprise grade law firm and to build their own independent practices.

We believe Clearlake’s model combines the best of both the traditional law firm and the legal consultancy model and represents a significant step forward for the legal industry.

If you think we could be an interesting step forward in your career, why not join one of our regular 20-minute Thursday lunchtime webinars, by registering here.

In the meantime, here is a brief message from our managing partner…