■ The Firm
Six decades of measured counsel.
Sterling & Vance is an independent partnership. We have never merged, never listed and never grown for its own sake. What follows is how a small firm came to sit in rooms usually reserved for the largest.
■ Chapter 01
Founded on a single principle
Eleanor Sterling and Thomas Vance left a Wall Street firm with one client and a conviction: that the best advice comes from lawyers who are free to say no. The partnership opened at 500 Park Avenue with six attorneys.
■ Chapter 02
London, and a second language of law
As clients’ interests crossed the Atlantic, so did we. The London office opened on St James’s Square, built around English and international arbitration rather than imported from New York.
■ Chapter 03
Through the crisis, beside our clients
When the financial system faltered, we restructured more than forty billion dollars of obligations without a single contested insolvency. It remains the work we are proudest of.
■ Chapter 04
Independent by design
Today 140 lawyers practise across two offices and thirty-one jurisdictions. We still take one in every four matters we are offered, and still answer to no one but our clients.
■ Philosophy
We would rather be right than first.
01
Judgement over volume
We take fewer matters so that every one receives the full attention of the people our clients chose.
02
A partner in every room
Senior lawyers do the thinking and the talking. Clients never meet their team for the first time in a crisis.
03
Independence without exception
No institutional shareholders, no referral arrangements, no conflicts carried for the sake of growth.