It’s not every day that you meet a private client advisor who is also a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, but this is Citi Private Bank’s Dan DiPietro’s proud boost. Citi have been servicing law firms in the US for around 35 years and Mr DiPietro has led the bank’s effort in this area for many of these. “We take an institutional approach to the needs of law firms. When we take on a firm as a client, the associates as well as partners have access to our services as of right,” he told WealthBriefing. Starting in New York, the unit was able to expand throughout the US as law firms were given the right to practice throughout the country. In 2002 it followed the trend of global expansion of legal services by establishing a European division of the law firm group under managing director James Tsolakis. An office opening in Hong Kong, the most logical extension of the existing service, is also on the cards. The law firm group, which accounts for over 200 professionals at Citi, services around 650 law firms, and over 35,000 partners and associates, globally. So extensive is Citi’s penetration into this market that it has developed a benchmarking service for law firms to compare key metrics within a selected peer group based upon a database built up over the years it has been servicing this market. Citi even employs a number of full-time analysts researching this area, and it is this “consultancy” service that gives Mr DiPietro his favoured status at Harvard. “We’re moving towards publication of the qualitative drivers of superior performance in law firms in partnership with Harvard,” said Mr DiPietro. Peer review amongst law firms is becoming much more topical as the trend away from partnership structures to LLP status has increased transparency. A forward-looking managing partner confidence index, already established in the US is scheduled for a third quarter UK roll-out. “The move towards incorporation has changed behaviour,” said Mr Tsolakis. “The firms now engage in treasury-style activities and this has caused us to look at firms differently.” “But the major changes have been driven by business imperatives rather than a shift in legal status. Although there’s been a lot of consolidation in the sector, there are still around 100 US law firms operating in the City of London.” Citi first decided to pursue law firms as a segment because it saw the very different needs of lawyers as a client group. The culture shock of entering a partnership, with its inevitably deleterious short-term cashflow effect is a very different experience from that of a corporate executive. Yet this measure of uncertainty doesn’t lead to the potentially huge gains that the even more uncertain entrepreneurial option gives. “Lawyers are often so client focused that they loose track of their own affairs and look very favourably on an advisor who can take much of this away from them,” said Mr Tsolakis. “Our involvement includes helping partners build investment portfolios with a well balanced asset allocation reflecting their financial objectives, and evolves over time as those financial objectives and priorities focus on building wealth to provide for their retirement.” “Law firms have moved away from using in-house private client expertise for their own staff,” added Mr DiPietro. “They tend to think it’s up to the individual to see to their own financial needs, although often we do get firm-wide referrals.”