Cleveland & Co Promotes Amanda Quaine to General Counsel, Strategic Advisory

Cleveland & Co is delighted to announce the promotion of Amanda Quaine to General Counsel, Strategic Advisory, a new senior role with firmwide responsibility for the firm's most complex, high-risk, and strategically significant client mandates.

Amanda joined Cleveland & Co in 2021, initially as Head of Funds and subsequently as Deputy General Counsel – EMEA. In the years since, she has become one of the most trusted and valued members of the firm's senior team; a lawyer whose judgement, counsel, and contribution to clients and colleagues alike has made a material difference to the firm. Her promotion is both a recognition of that and a reflection of the next stage in Cleveland & Co's evolution as a senior legal advisory platform.

Amanda is a dual-qualified lawyer with 27 years of experience, admitted in England & Wales and Victoria, Australia. She began her legal career at Arthur Robinson & Hedderwicks (now Allens), one of Australia's leading law firms, before moving to in-house roles at Credit Suisse First Boston. A distinctive chapter of her career was her time working on the administration of Lehman Brothers International (Europe), where she was part of the specialist legal team brought in following the firm's collapse. Working alongside the administrators to maximise recoveries for creditors, she advised on creditor claims, counterparty unwinding, and complex multi-jurisdictional legal issues, delivering high-value settlements including a landmark creditor matter and the release of £610 million from reserves, significantly increasing the second dividend to creditors. That experience gave Amanda an unusually deep understanding of systemic risk, legal resilience under crisis conditions, and the dynamics of high-stakes institutional matters.

She also previously served as principal lawyer for the hedge fund business at Threadneedle Asset Management (now Columbia Threadneedle Investments), where she held full legal and regulatory responsibility for the hedge fund platform, including briefing the boards of each fund, overseeing fund launches and restructurings across Cayman and Delaware master/feeder structures, and managing cross-border prime brokerage, financing arrangements, and regulatory change.

As General Counsel, Strategic Advisory, Amanda will work closely with the CEO and leadership team across all of Cleveland & Co's practices and client segments, providing senior legal judgement, oversight, and coordination on the firm's most complex and strategically significant client matters. The role is activated by the nature of a matter, its complexity, materiality, or reputational significance, rather than by subject matter or geography, and sits at the heart of how Cleveland & Co delivers its most important work.

An equally important dimension of the role is the support Amanda provides to Cleveland & Co's own General Counsels. Senior legal leadership can be an isolating position, the decisions carry real weight, situations are often novel, and there are rarely natural peers to consult within the same organisation. It is no coincidence that GC forums exist across every sector precisely because senior lawyers value the ability to speak candidly with someone who understands their position from the inside. At Cleveland & Co, Amanda provides exactly that: a trusted, experienced sounding board for the firm's General Counsels when they are navigating difficult matters, uncertain about the right approach, or looking for a peer perspective from someone who has operated at the same level. It is a deliberate part of how the firm supports its senior team, and, in turn, its clients.

Emma Cleveland, CEO of Cleveland & Co, commented:

"Amanda is one of the most important people in this firm. I trust her judgement completely, and over the years her advice, input, and counsel have made a real difference, to our clients, to the team, and to me personally. She is a genuinely exceptional lawyer with a breadth and depth of experience that is rare in this market, and a quality of thinking that I rely on. This promotion is not just a recognition of what she has achieved. It is about putting her exactly where she needs to be so that the firm and its clients can benefit fully from everything she brings. I am very proud of Amanda and very excited about what this next chapter means for Cleveland & Co."

Amanda Quaine commented:

"I am honoured to step into this role and excited by what it represents for the firm and for our clients. What I have always found most energising about this work is the combination of genuine intellectual complexity and real commercial consequence. The mandates where the stakes are highest and the answers are least straightforward are precisely where senior legal judgement matters most. That is what this role is about, and I am very much looking forward to bringing everything I have learned, across investment management, crisis administration, fund structuring, and regulation, to bear in service of our clients and the firm."