Noam Cohen and Hannah Genton | Changing the Legal Status Quo

Lawyers get a thrill from a fight. And Noam Cohen and Hannah Genton, founding partners of transactional law firm CGL, are taking on a major opponent: cultural expectations that lawyers must burn themselves out in exchange for high salaries and big bonuses.

CGL is a distributed law firm, meaning that its attorneys work wherever they want and on their own schedules. As long as they give clients exceptional service, they’re in charge of their own hours and where they spend them.

For example, Hannah is a morning person who lives in Salt Lake City, while Noam is a night owl who just moved to Israel.

The pair met at UC Berkeley Law, bonded over studying for the bar, and then survived careers in “BigLaw,” the collective nickname for the most prestigious law firms in the country.

Noam and Hannah both came to resent the industry’s attitude towards attorneys. Huge salaries and big bonuses are based on minimum billable hours, which encourage lawyers to work as hard as possible, whether they’re actually being productive or not.

“It's the golden handcuffs,” Noam says. “That's why it's really hard to leave BigLaw. Yet the burnout is so high. … It's very much ‘We'll solve this with money,’ and it doesn't work in the long run.”

She and Hannah argue that allowing attorneys to work where and when they’ll be at their most productive leads to a higher quality service for clients. Plus, not spending money on a centralized office means CGL can offer competitive rates. And clients who don’t have to worry about high billable hours are more engaged. 

“Back at my BigLaw firm, clients would call me and ramble five things and then jump off the phone because they were so concerned with my billable rate,” Hannah says. “It was hard to get deep with certain clients because of that price point. At CGL, we’ve found ourselves becoming a strategic partner to clients, which is how I always envisioned a lawyer: as part of the team.”

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👩 👩 Names: Noam Cohen and Hannah Genton

⚙️ What they do: Noam and Hannah are both lawyers and founding partners of CGL, a transactional law firm with a distributed model, i.e., no central office. Hannah also hosts The CGL Podcast.

📓 Company: CGL

💎 Words of wisdom: Noam: “We believe that people should be able to work autonomously, and to us, autonomously means every single person should set up their work and life in a way that maximizes their well-being as well as their professional productivity.”

Hannah: “One of our core values as a company is trust in our team and ourselves. What we’ve realized is that we’re able to access peak productivity when we aren’t in the traditional environment.”

🔍 Where to find Noam: LinkedIn

🔍 Where to find Hannah: LinkedIn | Twitter

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💡 Bar bonding: Noam and Hannah met at UC Berkeley Law and became friends while studying for the bar together.

💡 BigFlaw: Both went on to work in BigLaw — the collective nickname for the most prestigious law firms — but found that the rigorous structure and relentless hours didn’t suit them.

💡 Your money or your life: BigLaw firms typically throw money and perks at attorneys to convince them to accept grueling minimum billable hours — yet so many still burn out.

💡 Out of office: Together, Noam and Hannah founded CGL, a law firm with no central office. The attorneys work wherever and whenever suits them, as long as they deliver a high-quality service.

💡 Law for all: Not having a central office allows CGL to offer competitive rates, and makes them more accessible to smaller businesses that are undervalued by BigLaw firms.

💡 Legal team: Clients that don’t have to worry about high rates tend to be more communicative. Happy attorneys are more productive and engaged with their clients.

💡 The verdict: Even before the pandemic made remote communication more common, Noam says that most of their clients understood and appreciated the appeal of their model.

Noam Cohen and Hannah Genton:

Hannah: “Some folks are great at working at nighttime, some work in the middle of the day. Sitting at a desk may be optimal for someone, someone else might be on their best legal draft game when they're sitting on a couch or outside. Allowing people to tap into these higher levels of productivity is great because we get access to this top talent on their A-game. And for our team, they're allowed to work in a way that energizes them more than a one-size-fits-all model.”

Noam: “When you work in BigLaw, you have very high minimum billable hour requirements. You're rewarded for how much you bill, your bonuses are based on how much you bill. It was really important for us that we weren't rewarding people for working more than we needed them to. We don't want you to grind. We're not trying to lead you to burnout, which is what we and so many of our friends and colleagues experienced in BigLaw.”

Noam: “The product we sell is legal services, but that's provided by human beings. There's been a lack of a focus in the legal industry on the people that are actually producing the product.”

Noam: “I didn't last too long in BigLaw because I wasn't happy, and I want to be happy.”

Hannah: “Noam and I have had so many moments of questioning, ‘Does it have to be this way? Can we make it better?’ The legal industry is a place where I don't think those questions have been asked, and we're interested in poking holes.”