Clifford Chance

They're, they're usually very frank.

And, and, um, City, uh, had a legal team of Clifford Chance on, on... as the solicitors a- and a whole host of the very best barristers, not just in this country, some of them in the world.

And, uh, those people go through hearings, they sense directions of travel, uh, of panels, and they are frank with their clients.

They don't, they don't tend to, uh, sugarcoat it, and they would have laid out the risks.

Larissa did not plan a career in real estate.

She began as a lawyer practicing corporate finance law at Clifford Chance.

It wasn't until 2005 that she crossed into the investment world, joining Credit Suisse's Customized Fund Investment Group, now part of GCM Grosvenor.

After Credit Suisse, she had a few short stints at Franklin Templeton Real Estate Advisors and Morgan Creek Capital Management before settling in at Oak Street.

So tell us, first of all, how'd you end up in the real estate business? Let's start there.

Yeah, very much by accident.

I had been a lawyer, as you mentioned, so worked with Roger Singer and a variety of funds folks at Clifford Chance, really before there was even a funds group.

And so then went in-house to Credit Suisse, served as their counsel for their real estate fund and CFIG, the Customized Fund Investment Group, which is now GCM Grosvenor.

I mean, I've done

a lot of opinions for Clifford Chance when I was in Saudi Arabia.

And I always carved out the Sharia opinion because no law firm... will issue a legal opinion on Sharia because it is not codified.

It doesn't exist.

He was a giant of employment law in the 1980s and 1990s.

He practiced at Coward Chance, which became Clifford Chance.

He left active practice to build Eload, an employment law resource.

It stood for employment law on a disc, although it was a CD-ROM, and it was distributed by post quarterly to the big law firms as a subscription service in the early 90s.

And then from there, I sort of had the traditional big law path through law school recruiting.

So I started at Clifford Chance and then moved to two other firms.

First, at the time, it was called Hunton & Williams.

I think now it's Hunton Andrews Kurth and then Wilkie Farr & Gallagher.

... it's, it's kind of that.

You compare to Clifford Chance, they don't have a solicitor apprenticeship program.

They take a hundred trainees.

They, they have for the last couple of years, it stayed at a hundred.

And she said, well, you know, we're together, why don't you come with? And so I thought about this and...

I had applied for, I believe, but been rejected for, I believe, an application to a law firm that did international things called Coward Chance, today Clifford Chance.

And so that having failed, I was at a loose end.

So I thought, yeah, okay, I should go off to America for a year.

She was a professor at Boston College Law School and they needed someone to teach a short course on European community law, as it then was.

So I would go every September, October and teach a six-week course on European community law at Boston College, 85, 86, 87, so on and so forth.

And in the context of that, Cynthia introduced me to a law firm in Washington called Milbank Tweed Hadley and McCloy.

And I worked there with some very impressive partners, including Elliot Richardson, who had been Nixon's attorney general in 1973, who refused to resign, refused to, you know, resign.