Law firm Cassidy Levy Kent (CLK) has opened an office in Brussels focused on international trade, joining forces with three founding partners in the firm’s first transatlantic foray.

Yves Melin, Marie-Sophie Dibling and Joost Pauwelyn have joined as founding partners of CLK’s European entity, bringing with them the entirety of their teams from previous practices. CLK says the office will be one of the largest trade practices in Europe, comprising 15 lawyers.

The Brussels office adds to CLK’s practices in Washington and Ottawa, which all operate as separate legal entities, but under the same branding and banner.

Melin was previously a partner at Reed Smith, and his team’s focus is customs investigations and litigation. He has been a lawyer for 24 years at firms including Van Bael & Bellis, Squire Sanders (now Squire Patton Boggs) and Steptoe & Johnson.

Dibling joins from her previous position as a partner at King & Spalding, and brings her team focused on trade defence, market access and regulatory matters. She has spent over 15 years in the field, working for firms across France, the UK and Belgium including Fidal and Shearman & Sterling.

Pauwelyn is a professor of international law at the Geneva Graduate Institute, where he specialises in WTO law and international trade and investment disputes. He has been lecturing on the subject for 22 years, previously at Duke.

The firm is the culmination of a year of talks, Melin tells GTR. “We started to talk around a year ago about possibly joining forces. Ultimately, we decided to create our own boutique. Marie-Sophie, Joost and I are well established on the Brussels market and have complementary practices, each with our own strong bases of clients that chose us, not our firms; and dedicated teams [who have all joined the new venture].

“CLK does what we do in Washington and in Ottawa, they understand the US’s and Canada’s trade policies like no one else,” he adds. “We understand Brussels’s trade policy better than most. This understanding of trade policies on both sides of the Atlantic is what our clients need now more than ever, to understand changes and prepare for them, and to build bridges and understanding.”