‘Inwardly bullish’: Jaffa on reinvention & the American dream

opinion

by Rob Hodgetts

2 September 2024

James Jaffa, founder Jaffa & Co superyacht and aviation law firm.

Jaffa says beware the 'reserved exterior'.

You might imagine yacht and jet lawyers to be pedants in power dress or air-conditioned attack dogs. But spend any time talking to James Jaffa and you sense that soft skills are the real key.

“The beauty of buying and selling superyachts and jets is that it’s very emotional and it’s all about human behaviours,” he tells us.

Not that Jaffa is a soft touch. He’s gone from the character-building early days of traipsing around London and Monaco yacht brokerages looking for a break, to setting up his own law firm Jaffa & Co in 2019, to recently hiring US attorneys and opening a base in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. That’s alongside UK offices in London and Farnborough, and another in Monaco with a staff of 25 and counting. The Middle East is likely to be next.

Last year, Jaffa & Co took care of about $3bn of assets “split pretty evenly between assets that fly and float”. The firm has just become a member of the International Aircraft Dealers Association (IADA) in the US.

“All that knocking on doors, being turned away and having a thick skin for a while paid off,” says Jaffa, the firm’s founder and managing partner.

‘Inwardly bullish’

Propelling the business into the US is a natural evolution – another familiar theme of Jaffa’s – given the concentration of wealthy individuals keen to buy yachts and jets. It also helps backfill the chasm left by the collapse of the Russian yacht market, which was a “big blow” to business. But instead of walking into a bear pit, the Briton has felt at home.

“I like dealing with the Americans because they’re upfront, they’re straight talking and they like buying and selling boats and jets,” he says.

“That suits me because I enjoy the bullishness of that market, which weirdly is juxtaposed with my natural reserve. I’m quite reserved outwardly, but inwardly, I’m very bullish. What doesn’t always work in America is my English sense of humour, but I’m working on that.”

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After qualifying, Jaffa worked in commercial law and “didn’t love it” until he found a niche that allowed him to follow his passion for boats and sailing (he competed in European and World Championships in various classes but achieved “total mediocrity”). He joined a leading superyacht law firm but he admits he didn’t really fit with the culture and left to join another company, which was where the door knocking came in.

“When you’re in your 20s and you don’t have a track record it’s very difficult,” he says. “And then one guy gave me a shot. Let’s put it politely and say it was a ‘learning experience’, but you learn fast when you have to.”

Work snowballed, but after a number of years in London, frustration was starting to set in.

“One day I got a bit peeved with something fairly minor and I went for a walk at lunchtime,” says Jaffa. After some soul-searching he phoned his wife to tell her he wanted to set up on his own. They had just had their first child, but she agreed it was a good idea. Not long later he resigned and set about starting a company.

“I was always planning to do it, but I probably did it 10 years earlier than I thought I would. And thank heavens I did, because I’ve never had more fun,” he says.

James Jaffa with his Jaffa & Co team at the company's Farnborough, UK office.

Some of the Jaffa & Co team at the company’s Farnborough, UK office.

Kool-Aid

Jaffa launched in January 2019 and “worked around the clock” before hiring his first colleague two months later. His first yacht deal was on the award-winning 42m Sanlorenzo expedition yacht Moka. Six months later he did his first jet, a Gulfstream G550 for a long-standing yacht client, whose trust he is “very grateful for”.

“I figured how different can jets be?” he says. “The truth is, they’re very different. It takes you right back to the beginning, where you don’t know the key players. You don’t really know what you’re doing. It was quite a humbling experience.”

The push into the US is sparking those learning feelings all over again.

“There’s definitely no drinking of our own Kool-Aid,” he says. “I quite like the fact that it seems every five years or so, I get taken back down a peg or two and have to start again and learn.”

Buddies

One thing Jaffa likes about dealing with the US market is that prospects “tend to hunt in packs”. He once had a US client who was set to buy a “sizeable” yacht and had come over to the Monaco Yacht Show with a group of friends to view it. At dinner one night he had a change of heart, but another member of the group piped up and said, “If you don’t want it, I’ll take it”.

“It’s just really interesting that they’re much more open about their business and what they buy and sell than Europeans are,” says Jaffa.

“It’s much more fraternal and that has been very different, but it suits me because I find it makes them easier to deal with. Plus, when you do a good job for them, they tell their buddies.”

Look in the eyes

The “game changer” for Jaffa & Co was recruiting top talent to cover the breadth of specialities needed in superyacht and jet transactions. But the hiring process is also one of the growth challenges with scaling a company, says Jaffa.

“I’m very glad we will never have to hire in a rush again because it’s really important that you get people that fit with your culture and get buy-in to what you’re trying to achieve,” he says. “Now we can be much more selective.”

Jaffa says one of the keys to being a good lawyer is the ability to manage personalities and different cultures. The willingness to “look people in the eyes” rather than just getting caught up in words on a page is also an advantage.

“When people are sitting around a table together, you can interpret whether or not they’re behaving as they should and that affects how you structure a whole transaction,” he says.

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He cites a recent deal on a “quite high value, quite new” 50m yacht with a Chinese seller and American buyer. “They are culturally so different,” he says. “The Asian market is bigger than a lot of people would realise but they are all about saving face and respect. Sometimes to our Western ears and eyes, that can look as though it translates into saying things that aren’t followed up in actions precisely as they were communicated.

“The American got very frustrated, so having good brokers and good lawyers to massage the whole process and interpret was essential.

“It was a successful deal, it just wasn’t easy. But anybody who tells you that superyacht deals are easy and straightforward these days is either overly optimistic or wilfully blind and/or inexperienced. There’s always a curveball.”

‘In your shoes’

Another essential quality to be a top lawyer, according to Jaffa, is the ability to guide clients in their decisions.

“Clients appreciate us saying, ‘this is what I would do in your shoes,'” he says. “It may come with a bit of a caveat that says ‘this is the law, it’s your money and you decide how much risk you want to apply’. But if you want to avoid risk completely, you wouldn’t ever buy anything.”

One quirk of his role at the head of Jaffa & Co is that while he is no longer at the coalface, Jaffa still gets calls from clients asking for a sense check.

“I find myself in this weird position where I give more personal advice to our clients in respect of the legal advice that my law firm has given them,” he says. “It is strange, but it is good and it works. It probably drives the team mad.”

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Alongside the usual strains of running your own business, Jaffa is occasionally kept awake at night by talk of a softening brokerage market. From his viewpoint, there are still plenty of transactions happening, but they just take more work. “Our business has slowed down a little, but not meaningfully at all,” he says. His observation is that the market is in a kind of stand-off, where “sellers aren’t desperate to sell, but buyers aren’t desperate to buy, and everybody just needs a bit more reassurance than before”.

For Jaffa, the vision is to create the preeminent law firm for yachts and jets.

“If you take the bullish interior rather than the reserved exterior, I won’t be happy until every single yacht transaction on the planet is done through our law firm,” he says.