Tele-soliciting from Tel Aviv

Trevor Asserson runs an English law practice from the top of a tower overlooking the Mediterranean.

By ZIV HELLMAN
Tele-soliciting from Tel Aviv (photo credit: ASSERSON LAW OFFICES)
Tele-soliciting from Tel Aviv
(photo credit: ASSERSON LAW OFFICES)
A very Israeli view can be seen through the windows of Asserson Law Offices on the 32nd floor of the circular tower of the Azrieli Center in Tel Aviv. The city is spread out at your feet. In the distance, the Mediterranean sea sparkles on a sunny day, dotted with white pleasure craft.
Inside, however, you might as well be in central London. The firm’s partners and associates are virtually all graduates of Oxford or Cambridge. The books lining the shelves of the offices are devoted to English law. Clients come to Asserson Law Offices expecting lawyers to argue their cases before judges and courts in England. In fact, if they need representation in an Israeli court, they will be directed elsewhere.
“This is an English law firm in the wrong country,” admits founding partner Trevor Asserson, 55, who moved to Israel from London in 2005. A tall, courteous man with a face that seems always to be smiling, he does not seem to fit the model of a hard-nosed litigator, but the legal directory, Chambers UK Solicitors: A Client’s Guide, ranks Trevor Asserson in its top 20.
In the few short years since it was founded, Asserson Law has gained high regard in both England and Israel. Chambers places it among a global top 20 list of litigation firms in the UK. Legal 500 classifies it as one of the top firms in Israel. Last year The Lawyer magazine in Britain named the practice second in its rankings for Middle East Law Firm of the Year, besting international rivals located in Bahrain and Dubai.
There is apparently a large and increasing demand for the services that Asserson Law provides. The firm has been growing at a furious pace, from a one-lawyer operation less than six years ago to a staff of 20 lawyers today. Israeli clients needing English legal services obviously like the fact that they need not travel to the UK to meet with Asserson lawyers, but the firm also has plenty of clients in other countries, including UK-located individuals and corporations who have no problem with the fact that their solicitor is based in Tel Aviv instead of London.
“A basic policy of our office that is fundamental to our business strategy is that we say we will always be in England whenever you need us,” Asserson tells The Jerusalem Report. But that does not mean his colleagues are in London most of the time. Trevor Asserson himself typically spends one week each month in London, arriving on a Sunday and returning to Israel on Thursday. The other lawyers average even less time outside of Israel.
Location
All this is made possible by modern technology, which frees lawyers and many other professionals from having to be in a specific location. With modern options for constant communication, it hardly matters that the office overlooks the Mediterranean rather than the Thames.
All the lawyers keep a suit and tie for their trips to London, but the dress code in Tel Aviv is strictly non-formal. “Even if we video-conference with clients in London, we wouldn’t bother to change clothes. It’s one of the advantages of being here,” says Asserson.
“I thought of the idea of opening this office when I noticed that my clients were foreign companies, foreign governments and multinationals based outside the UK, whom I had to travel to see anyway,” says Asserson.
“Eight-five percent of my work was for people not in the UK. They were Europeans, South Americans, North Americans or Russians. I had clients in the Balkans and the Czech Republic. They were outside England anyway and it didn’t really matter to them that their lawyer was far away.”
Asserson regards his office as a vanguard of a trend involving borderless, high-level professional service industries that he expects will expand globally in the coming years and will be a boon for Israel. Well-educated and skilled potential immigrants to Israel from Western countries, who in the past may have hesitated to move here because they feared harming their careers, will no longer need to sacrifice anything by choosing to raise their families in Kfar Saba or Jerusalem.
“I think a potential future industry for Israel is to provide top-level services in a whole variety of specializations to Western industry, from a lower cost base in Israel,” he says. “Large banks have opened call centers in India. The equivalent is to have legal centers in Israel. That is already happening in this office to a degree. There is no reason is already starting to happen, and in much of banking and financial services, where research into shares and stocks is already mostly done on the Web.”
Trevor Asserson grew up in the Hampstead Garden Suburb, an upscale neighborhood in northwest London with a large Jewish population. But he recalls not being Jewishly aware as a child. “I grew up very much as an Englishman,” he says. “I went to a school with a chapel. I actually went to church every day.”
Litigation
After reading history at Oxford, Asserson decided to take up law. Upon completing his legal studies, he joined Herbert Smith LLP, England’s top-ranked litigation firm. Six years later, a growing interest in observant Judaism led him to move to Israel. He passed the Israel bar exams and qualified at Herzog, Fox & Neeman, but returned to England, rising to the position of global head of litigation at Bird & Bird.
“I was increasingly feeling part of a minority in England. I wanted my children to live in a country where they didn’t feel they were part of some minority,” he says. Seven years ago, he moved with his wife and two children to live in Jerusalem and set up Asserson Law.
Part of the secret of Asserson’s success is the advantage of having a general lower cost base in Israel. “We are providing very high-level legal services with really top professionals at approximately 50 percent of the price of a high-level firm in the UK,” says Asserson. “In litigation, which is an open check where the cost can easily be more than a million dollars, telling someone that it might reach only half a million dollars is a significant saving.”
The commitment to being in England whenever a client requires an Asserson lawyer to be on site adds costs that a London-based firm might not have to bear, but Asserson says he still comes out ahead. The practice employs two lawyers in a small office in London, largely for planning.
“I don’t think twice about fixing a meeting in England and will sometimes not charge the time of travel or even the air fare, depending on the arrangements I’ve got with the client,” says Asserson. “I actually see many of my clients more often than I used to see them in England. That’s clearly an expense but we do offer it and it really does work.”
The firm’s partners and associates need to monitor e-mails on Fridays and sometimes work on Fridays, which is the first day of the weekend in Israel. However, they regard Sunday as a bonus when they are under pressure, getting a full day of work while their counterparts in the UK have a day off.
The two-hour difference between Israel and the UK is also an advantage for Asserson, enabling the practice to get a head start on the day. Asserson admits that one Australian client posed “a challenge for finding hours of the day to talk.”
Asserson describes the legal systems from which he recruits lawyers as broadly “the British Empire,” which left similar legal systems in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Scotland, England and – a wink and a smile – the United States. “All those countries essentially have systems similar to English law,” he explains. “Even American law is incredibly similar. Lawyers trained in these jurisdictions can easily switch.”
The firm’s client base is also diverse, including sovereign states, multinational corporations, public companies, private enterprises and individuals. “Bank Mizrachi gives us a great deal of work, and also Paz Oil,” says Asserson. “The Israeli government has turned to us for advice on English law. Our clients include two Russian oligarchs, with a third in the pipeline.”
Asserson has even advised an Egyptian manufacturer pursuing litigation in the UK.
The firm also recently represented a client taking the British government to the highest court in London over a dispute involving solar panel subsidies. “The government argued that if they lost, it would cost the treasury £1.5 billion,” says Asserson. “We took it from initial motions to the Supreme Court in four to five months, and we won every time.”
With the firm’s staff now at 20, Asserson can offer a broad range of legal coverage.
Even in fields such as arbitration and real estate, lawyers do not need to be based in Britain full-time.
Baruch Baigel, a graduate of Cambridge University and Harvard, is Asserson’s arbitration specialist. Despite his regular work with the London Court for International Arbitration, he has not been there since January. “A lot of the work can simply be done by e-mail,” Baigel tells The Report.
Fly over
David Prais, a managing partner at Asserson who mainly handles real estate, says that even he is not usually required to be on site. “There is mostly a lot of paper work,” says Prais. “If you’ve got a complicated development site, you’d go and visit it. If I need to go over for a big job, I’ll fly over. But more often these days you go on Google Maps and look at the property you are dealing with. Even if I were in the UK, lawyers there charge so much per hour that clients don’t really ask them to travel across London. It just doesn’t really happen.”
One member of the firm who does travel quite a bit is Andrew Somper, a commercial lawyer whose trips are mainly to countries in emerging markets in Africa and South America, where he represents Israeli infrastructure and energy companies. His experience working in Britain before moving to Israel two years ago is an asset because of the pervasive use of English law for international contract law, enabling Asserson to draw many clients.
“If you’ve got a contract in Africa, you’ve got a choice between the law of Rwanda, which most people do not regard as a very attractive possibility, or American or English law,” says Somper. “The English court system is trusted if there is any litigation or arbitration.”
Asserson is clearly proud of what he has managed to achieve in a short space of time. “This is the future for Israel,” he says.
“Previously, if you wanted to make aliya you had to throw all your experience out the window. That is no longer true. I believe that the provision of international standard services from Israel by people from the top universities is going to enable the next wave of aliya from the West.”