Discover Benelux |  Special Theme |  Legal Excellence

International – but not remote When one Luxembourg lawyer questioned why major business clients had to forgo personal service when accessing top flight legal support the answer was obvious: they shouldn’t have to. TEXT: MARTIN PILKINGTON | PHOTOS: BEERENS & AVOCATS

will be actively involved in case-files. In the bigger firms, clients tend to lose touch with the particular lawyer in charge of their project.” Beerens’s approach has proved successful. His organisation works with clients who might usually be expected to take their business to legal leviathans.

Bernard Beerens, like his colleagues in Luxembourg-based Beerens & Avocats, cut his legal teeth in major international law firms. In his case that experience involved roles in leading Dutch and British practices, and a stint in New York. The experience was high-powered and glamorous, but there was something missing.

From Luxembourg to the world “What can be difficult in larger structures is that you lose personal contact with clients and the full picture of what they are about, because of constant changes within the law firm,” he says. “My colleagues and I have all come from major firms, and wish to offer another style of service to the same sophisticated clientele.”

clients as shorthand for how we operate. I often hear people who seek a legal advisor in Luxembourg complain about the way things tend to be with the biggest firms. We can be more flexible, match what we do to the actual needs of the client.”

The personal touch What was missing then was continuity and the personal, the basis for creating a “boutique law firm”. As Beerens describes it: “Boutique is a term I use with potential

70 |  Issue 12 |  December 2014

“Here the client will, for example, meet with me. I’ll follow their dossier in its entirety, and develop a personal relationship. The client knows I’m easily accessible. Partners here

Because of the special nature of Luxembourg, a small country where numerous multi-national companies and other corporate bodies have their headquarters, Beerens’s practice has been built to advise such major clients in their cross-border transactions. “Our practice focuses on company and financial law, taxes and investments and so on,” says Beerens. “Finding highly competent people in Luxembourg who are happy to join a smaller structure is not easy. But it is fruitful.”