Kofi Mensah, a partner at the law firm ABM Attorneys at Law, is in a back corner at a bourgeois dive bar in Accra, drinking vodka and discussing the evolution of legal practice in Ghana—specifically, the centuries-old tradition of wearing robes and white wigs to court.
“Why,” laughs the 34-year-old, “is a black guy wearing a white wig?”
The legal game in Ghana has long been dominated by old established firms headed by older, venerated attorneys. The rapid success of Mensah and his partners at ABM—all foreign-educated and under 45—heralds a new generation of cosmopolitan, business-savvy, attorneys.
Alfonso Amorin, Kofi Mensah, Richard Boateng
Not that the three-man shop, with an estimated cash value of $2.5 million, hasn’t been met with scepticism.
“There’s a general perception of us as: ‘three young guys, what will they be able to do?’” Mensah says. “Most people still want to see their lawyers as 55-year-old men with grey hair. The legal landscape here is still conservative. And we’re young guys who are transaction-focused.”
Mensah was literally born to be a lawyer. His father, DK, is a legend—at 86, he is Ghana’s oldest practising attorney.
In 2007, Mensah met Richard Boateng, 44, and Alfonso Amorin, 37, in class at the Ghana School of Law. He had just returned from law school at Syracuse University in New York, the other two from England.
“We had established outside of Ghana; we had a certain way of doing things—we were used to a fast-paced environment and used to providing innovative legal solutions as opposed to just doing the same thing over and over again,” Mensah says. “We thought with our common background it would be easy to put together a firm. At the time most of the older firms were sort of moving at a snail’s pace.”
They also identified a gaping hole in the legal market. As investment and land development soared in Ghana, there were few firms to deal with the many contracts.
“There was a void, and we’d all returned with one objective: to plug that void,” Boateng says. “We had new ideas, we wanted them to actually breathe. At that time clients were unable to get what they were looking for and the whole system was very archaic. Five years ago, lawyers would elongate cases, clients would be frustrated. Our opening coincided with a new directive from the Ministry of Justices that said lawyers needed to be more accountable. No longer could you just go to court and get an injunction.”
Each man invested $33,000 in the company. The aim was to act as legal and business counsel. Their first client was a woman who had been unceremoniously fired and needed legal help to recover her salary. She paid the upstarts at ABM a grand total of $60.
“Six months from that day, we had a client who paid us six figures,” says Mensah.
On a given day the three lawyers balance 30 cases. Seventy-five per cent of the firm’s work is transaction-based, whether corporate, securities, real estate or commercial. The rest is geared to litigation that comes out of those transactions.
“It is still primarily a litigation shop. We don’t go for the obvious high-paying deals. We like the challenge,” says Mensah.
They go for the big fish too, including: Ghanaian-American investment bank Frontline Capital Advisers; 2GIH, the developer of the Radisson Conakry; the soon-to-open Accra Marriott; Maersk Line; and Waratah Investments, an Australian company which owns substantial stakes in publicly-traded mining companies.
Their youngest client is Aisha Obuobi, the 25-year-old design prodigy behind Ghanaian clothing label Christy Brown, which ABM is helping to open a flagship store in Accra.
That youthful energy is on display at the ABM offices, off a quiet street in the well-heeled suburb of Osu, not far from where Mensah was raised. Amorin is from the Volta region and Boateng grew up in Britain. The trio prefers custom Savile Row suits with colorful silk pocket squares and fast cars. Conference room walls are lined with golf trophies and books on sports law, the desks stacked with legal journals, alongside issues of Vanity Fair and John Grisham thrillers. Boateng, an avid golfer, invites clients to take a crack at the portable putting range in his office, before he sits down to tackle the case.
They play hard and work hard. Boateng was in the office the day after his daughter was born in October. Mensah pauses several times during a dinner to take calls from clients.
“We don’t have ‘bankers’ hours,’” he says sheepishly. “We’re available at 2 AM.”
These law geeks take glee in watching the country’s legal system modernize.
“Intellectual property has never been more respected,” Boateng says. Behind his desk hang both his long black court robes and a custom suit jacket—“it’s three button, double-breasted”—with a purple pocket square.
“We have a case in court right now in which the defendants don’t understand how they could be in court. We’ve had to explain intellectual property.”
Accra’s rapid expansion has also created a lot of problems in terms of litigation, says Amorin, the resident real estate specialist in the firm.
“Because when there are land shortages, you have people buying land that’s already been sold to other people. We’ve seen a big increase in land disputes and I’ve been conducting due diligence on real estate transactions. We’ve seen a rise of more than 10 new cases a week in the last three years, due to due diligence on real estate,” he says.
Just four years after its first case, ABM is working on transactions for the developing Radisson hotel projects in Benin and Guinea and plans to expand further afield. Their mission is to stay at the forefront of legal innovation as growth in West Africa skyrockets.
“You don’t want to be the firm that did well for its first four years and then is irrelevant,” Mensah says. “The client goes to bed, and their problem becomes your problem. We worry about failing the client or not being able to represent the client in a way that’s good for them.”
He’s asked if he ever loses, and scoffs. “Never,” he says. “Never.”