Pallas’ Natasha Harrison: ‘I felt completely like an outsider who went into the law’

She was ready to take over after one of the world’s most famous lawyers, veteran David Boies. But Natasha Harrison was not too much in awe of her mentor to strike out alone.

Despite being named heir to Boies’ powerhouse New York law firm Boies Schiller Flexner less than a year earlier, the Surrey-born lawyer stopped in November. Her mission: to establish a rival outfit in London and create a modern law firm from scratch.

Harrison, 49, had been promoted to vice president of Boies Schiller in December 2020 by Boies, widely regarded as one of the best litigation attorneys of his generation. Boies, now 81, helped end the legal ban on gay marriage in California, as well as representing the Department of Justice in its 2001 antitrust victory over Bill Gates and Microsoft.

When the pandemic hit, Harrison helped lead Boies Schiller as its co-managing partner during a difficult transition period. But last year, she resigned in a chokexit to start a rival law firm, taking a group of Boies Schiller’s London employees with her. Pallas Partners opened its doors in February.

Her exit came at a difficult time for Boies Schiller. The firm has been haunted by controversy over David Boies’ place on the board of blood test start-up Theranos, whose CEO Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of fraud, and his previous work for Harvey Weinstein. It has also been undergoing a difficult restructuring with a focus on urgent succession planning. More than 80 lawyers have left Boies Schiller since 2020, including Harrison and 26 London staff who chose to take her.

Despite that, she says Boies supported her move. “David is a very intelligent – intellectual and emotionally intelligent – man, and when I mapped out what I wanted to do, he understood that,” she explains. “He did the same thing when he left Cravath [Swaine & Moore, to found his own firm]. David is also someone who likes to challenge the status quo, ”she adds.

Harrison says her aim is to disrupt the enclosed and “clubbed” culture that pervades the UK legal industry by creating a more inclusive culture and moving away from the billable hour in favor of hedge fund and finance world models.

“The law firm model has not changed in a few hundred years, and as someone who comes from a non-traditional background, I am much more likely to challenge things,” she says.

Harrison, who grew up in Surrey in a Greek-Irish family of four girls, has named his law firm Pallas after Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and warfare. The name is a nod to Harrison’s Greek Cypriot heritage on her father’s side, and the fact that she’s going to battle on behalf of clients.

These struggles have in the past included representing investors after Iceland’s bank collapse in the financial crisis – a case that put her on the map. Current cases include filing a class action lawsuit against Credit Suisse on behalf of investors in the Swiss bank’s Greensill-affiliated supply chain financing funds and representing bondholders suing the bank over Mozambique’s 2 billion tonne bond scandal. USD.

Pallas will take on major financial disputes and investigations, including securities litigation in the UK and Europe, and the company will invest in some of its own cases as an alternative to invoicing per share. hour.

Corporate customers have long complained about being invoiced per. hour, an opaque way of paying that can lead to conspicuous and unpredictable fees at the end of a trial period or appointment. The billable hour is also blamed for high burnout among lawyers, who are tasked with hitting cumbersome goals each year to justify their pay and bonuses.

Smaller litigation-focused firms like Pallas can be more agile when it comes to charging models and taking financial risks, and the majority of Pallas customers do not pay per share. hour. Some pay instead a percentage of the value of their case or deal. In other cases, the company charges reduced hourly rates in exchange for the full amount back plus extra if they succeed.

Harrison draws on its own experience with hedge fund clients by setting up an investment committee that will “stress test” the financial risk that Pallas takes at any given time.

“[The billable hour] incentives for the wrong behavior, ”says Harrison. “A lawsuit is motivated to make lawsuits last as long as possible, but most clients do not want it[that]. . . And it creates a mindset where you constantly value every minute of your time. I’m surprised I did not put charge codes on the kids’ dinners sometimes! ”

Harrison says coming up with a new law firm from scratch was an opportunity to create a firm that would make lawyers from all backgrounds feel included, as opposed to starting her own career.

She says: “[Law is] still clubbed. . . It’s men in their member clubs who hang out together. . . just reinforce each other. “

Harrison was the first in her family to go to university. When she was called to the bar in 1996, women were not allowed to wear pants, an experience that marked her desire to change the system.

“I felt completely like an outsider going into law,” she says. “I did not come from a professional academic family. I knew no lawyers at all, except for a little work experience. And when I started at the bar, it was white, masculine and Oxbridge-dominated. I worked so hard because I thought I had to do it a million times better than anyone else to be taken seriously. ”

Harrison hopes to promote a more diverse and inclusive culture through policies, including blind recruitment – she uses technology that will exclude applicants’ schools – and mentoring schemes. And she does not want any employee to miss a sports day or parent’s night. “When you work from home, you absolutely have to pick up your kids from school… The beauty of hybrid work is that you can flex things a lot more,” she says.

Harrison is also considering rocking the way her lawyers get paid. Pallas associates are paid according to the “Cravath scale” – a benchmark set by one of the oldest law firms in the United States, which means that an eighth-year associate brings home half a million dollars in salary and annual bonus.

These amounts follow sharply rising salaries at top U.S. law firms in the midst of a fierce war for talent. Harrison says she is interested in finding out if employees have other ideas about how they would like to be paid – for example, setting specific bonus goals in advance instead of applying a uniform hourly goal. She will conduct a review in consultation with her attorneys.

Harrison has already reduced an employee’s hourly goal to enable her to take on a large portion of pro bono work. The company dedicates 5 percent of its resources to pro bono work each year until 2025 – something she says is an often missed element in the war for talent.

“[We hear this a lot at the moment] about how employees are terribly unhappy. . .[But]most of them love the law and want to do a good job and have good experience, but they want more than that. And I think it’s one of those things to tackle their generation’s problems. And that gives them some power back. “

Harrison says she’s in some ways part of “Great Resignation,” in which workers reevaluated their lives under Covid. She says: “Covid really forced me to reevaluate my life… But if I look back, I think it was inevitable that I would end up here.”