Author: Natalie A. Gerhardstein
After a career in music journalism and IT, Claude Englebert found his “defining moment” in his 40s when he decided to become a lawyer. The founder of Infuero, an “à la carte” law firm catering to entrepreneurs, talks about how it’s never too late to try new things.
Claude Englebert has called his career trajectory “atypical”: he got his start as a freelance journalist, writing for music magazines. It was an interest that stemmed from playing bass guitar—”that’s not really a musician,” he says jokingly, “but it’s really close.”
The early 1990s, he says, was a “pioneering” time for media and, given that the organisations didn’t have proper content management systems at the time, he quickly started building and hard coding for their websites. This—plus what he saw as the lack of potential for career growth in music journalism—led him to set up several companies focused on IT development and later hosting.
By 2008, Englebert had joined Adobe as a product marketing manager for ColdFusion software.
“In my position, I could really understand everything when it came to technical sales, marketing, etc. But I was also leading the deals we got in compliance for licences, and I used to be challenged on the legal aspects by teams of lawyers that were discussing things I did not understand.”
But Englebert says he’s always up for a challenge and was thus prompted to request law courses and, once back in the classroom, he asked himself, “Shall I drop everything and go for the challenge?”
And so he did. In 2013, he quit his job at Adobe. Entering the University of Liège classroom at 41 was a “defining moment… I’d had three successful careers already, and I was starting over from zero.”
Although he was “scared to death” of being the oldest in the classroom, the younger students gave him a heartwarming welcome. “I can even say that I made some friends for life,” he adds.
“We try to sell value instead of selling time because that works with our way of doing the job.”Claude Englebert, founder of Infuero
A legal startup
After getting his master’s in business law, he joined the Brussels Bar and Luxembourg Bar in 2017 and 2020, respectively, and decided to launch Infuero, which Englebert has previously described to Silicon Luxembourg as “the law firm I would have dreamed of meeting when I was in a startup as well as in a large company.”
With a focus on SMEs and startups, the law firm normally works under a model of a monthly, flat fee subscription for legal advice and services. While some specific issues fall outside of their range of services—AML legislation, for instance—the subscription includes unlimited consultation, help with document drafting, revision, and more. Infuero also has a ticketing system, so clients can open tickets similar as they might when IT issues arise.
Infuero also aims to simplify topics for its members and provides entrepreneurs and startups with a knowledge base, offering free training classes to help them be as autonomous as possible. “It’s not that we don’t want to have their questions, but basically we try to sell value instead of selling time because that works with our way of doing the job,” Englebert explains.
Englebert gets a lot of inspiration by working with other entrepreneurs, some of whom have hard to restart multiple times. “I experience new things every day,” he says. “It was the same when I was at university. And that’s why working with startups is so exciting: I like to meet new people, entrepreneurs with ideas I would never have thought of.”
Article courtesy of our content partner Silicon Luxembourg
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