A former partner at Mishcon de Reya has left the firm to launch a corporate boutique in London. 

Angeli Arora has parted company with Mishcon after two years to launch the new firm, named Allectus, having earlier set up and led the Hong Kong practice at legacy firm Bingham McCutchen and headed Dentons’ private equity team in Africa. 

“The aim with Allectus is to provide a highly personalised service for clients – to know their business inside out and be an integral part of their team, rather than focus on deal volume,” Arora said. “That’s how we’ll differentiate ourselves.”

The new firm will primarily service funds clients in areas including investor disputes, special situation investments, ESG investments and M&A and private equity. Arora’s clients have included Armat Group and Amethis Finance.

Arora is currently Allectus’ sole lawyer, but in the medium term aims to build a team of experienced partners who will take on fewer but more complex transactions. She said alongside a different client offering the new firm will offer lawyers a different way of working than they would have in a large firm, as well as potentially a higher revenue share. 

Arora also aims to take advantage of what she views as gaps in the market, saying that traditional law firms’ model of high volume work done by teams of mostly junior lawyers is not as well suited for certain areas – like ESG and shareholder activism – as the more personalised service offered by Allectus. 

Arora, who won the Commercial Lawyer of the Year award at Global Legal Post’s Women and Diversity in Law Awards earlier this year, launched and later led Bingham McCutchen’s Hong Kong office while still in her twenties and became a partner at the firm at 30 at five years post qualification. The team merged with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, which she describes as her “legal home”, in 2014 and shortly after she joined Dentons, where she led the firm’s private equity team in Africa. 

Arora’s client base includes financial institutions, funds, family offices, corporates and HNW entrepreneurs. Over the course of her career she has advised funds clients on their investments in more than 70 jurisdictions. 

The launch of Allectus marks the latest instance of a senior lawyer leaving behind the constraints of Big Law to set up their own shop, including former Mishcon partner Liz Ellen, who left the firm back in 2020 after 15 years to found a sports boutique in London. 

And just last month Jonathan Lopez and Billy Jacobson, two former prosecutors in the DOJ’s fraud section, left the partnership at Allen & Overy to launch their own white collar boutique in Washington DC ahead of the firm’s planned merger with Shearman & Sterling.