Jean Tamalet: The enfant terrible of French white-collar-crime law

Asked the inevitable first question – ‘So, what’s it like to be a celebrity lawyer?’ – Jean Tamalet doesn’t flinch: “My clients are the famous ones, not me.” Yet being a lawyer to the stars has meant dealing with celebrity problems: threats, hundreds of messages from distressed individuals pleading with him to take on their case, a borderline-fetishistic superfan stalking him on the streets of Paris.

When talking about his abilities as a lawyer, however, Tamalet is far less demure: “[It’s been] Twenty years that my left arm raises the shield above my clients and my right arm lowers my sword to split from top to bottom,” he stated in a 2023 post on LinkedIn marking the 20th anniversary of having passed the Bar. Twenty years crossing swords in courtrooms to defend his clientele of billionaires, high-profile CEO and multinational companies against sophisticated legal onslaughts that demand the highest levels of skill and ingenuity to see off. “You need to look beyond the conventional and grapple with the forces that influence the outcome of a case,” opines the juridical man-at-arms. Because in the high-profile, high-stakes legal cases that are Tamalet’s stock-in-trade, legal expertise alone is seldom enough. People are watching his every move and so he must ask himself “a billion questions.” His job, as he sees it, “is about strategic intelligence.”

Driven to succeed   
The young Jean planned to enlist in the armed forces, but a tragedy changed his career path, and led him to medicine instead, driven by a desire to save lives. Alas, insufficient mathematical aptitude forced him, once again, to reevaluated his professional future. He was already 20 when he began studying law in 1996, inspired by an encounter with famed criminal-defense lawyer, Henri Leclerc. Then, a year later, he became a father for the first time.

Back then, a dad being fully involved in childcare was a rarity, and despite being invested in the role he would regularly hear people say “tell this to the mother,” when they dispensed parenting advice. His duties as a young father didn’t get in the way of studying for a corporate-law degree. Having decided not to focus exclusively on criminal law, he did his coursework between bottle feeds and diaper changes, often skipping lectures because they were ‘too top-down’ for him.

You don’t wait for permission to speak – you seize the moment to do so

A graduate of the Sorbonne in Paris and the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, the father of three – who as a boy had been labeled “a dunce with no future,” in whom no one had diagnosed his hyperactivity – also attended Paris’ Lysias school of public speaking, where he developed a taste for oratory “like all people who are a little vain.”

A young man with a family to support, Tamalet, the erstwhile underachiever, knuckled down and turned himself into a self-taught success. At the very start of his career in law, he met Antoine Kirry, who interviewed him for a position at Debevoise & Plimpton. This, ultimately, is what sets him on the path toward a career in corporate criminal law.

Sneaky John
Rambaud Martel (before the merger with Orrick), Linklaters and Brandford Griffith Avocats Associés: Jean Tamalet took to law like a duck to water. He was never going to be the type to content himself in the role of foot-soldier at a large firm forever, though, and in 2011 set up his own operation, Tamalet & Associées, hiring “white collar criminal law star” Aurélie Chazottes in the process (a colleague to this day) and, as luck would have it, landed a part in one of the biggest white-collar-crime trials of the day, the so-called Oil-for-Food case. “What a lucky break!” The legal director of a small company in northern France caught up in the scandal came across his name while searching for a lawyer specializing in corporate criminal law in the Paris Bar directory. Tamalet was the only name listed, strangely, despite the field already having several leading figures in France: the duo Haïk-Laffont, Olivier Metzner, Hervé Temime etc.

Tamalet was off to the races: He expanded his network and was hired to take part in high-profile case after high-profile case, from the A380 subsidies scandal, to the Bernard Tapie corruption imbroglio. No faceless brief, his desire to put Tamalet & Associées on the map drove him to deliberately seek prominent individuals as clients from day one. “Convincing a prospective client to hire me was a big thrill,” admits the King & Spalding partner.

His associates at the American firm, which he joined in 2020 after an 18-month stint at Bird & Bird, gave him the nickname “Sneaky John” ‒ in this firm of battle-tested veterans, Tamalet’s wily reputation clearly proceeded him.

Thrill-seeker
A reservist in the French Air Force, Tamalet is used to taking leaps of faith, albeit with a parachute strapped to his back. In fact, he once considered packing in his legal career to become a full-time sky-diving instructor, chasing “the Point Break vibe” dear to many of these ariel thrill-seekers. Sky-diving, at which he competes internationally, is a major passion.

The curious among you can seek out a YouTube vid featuring Tamalet and Les Affranchis ‒ the name of his team [derived from the French title of the 1990 movie Goodfellas], whose members are known for their “acidic” sense of humor. And just like when creeping to the edge of a jump-door at 12,000ft, Tamalet still gets butterflies before his court appearances – not that you would guess from the way he strides into the courtroom, a trick he learned from former Paris Bar Association head Mario Stasi (the elder), who advised the young Tamalet to burst into a courtroom like it’s a saloon. Tamalet has incorporated this into his overall “badboy barrister” image.

But an honest one: if lawyers are considered “mercenaries” for their clients, for Tamalet, it’s important to separate image from reality. “You get less from a lie than you do with the truth,” he insists. In any case, he’s not there to make friends.

He shares his home with two cats and four dogs, his four children now grown-up. To his offspring, he repeatedly stresses that “you don’t wait for permission to speak – you seize the moment to do so.” For their sake, he fears the geopolitical shifts of recent years: the war in Ukraine, the conflict in the Middle East, the return of the Taliban… This “sense of normality we are settling into in the face of situations that should call for immediate political reactions” troubles him.

It’s a long way from the central Paris in the 1980s where he spent his childhood, holed up in the backstage of a theatre, or idling at the end of a dinner-table surrounded by starlets and sopranos. With an opera-singer father and a talent-agent mother, culture and the arts were a staple of the Tamalet household. He enjoys classical music as much as French “Boomer rap like NTM and IAM”

He spent his middle-school lunches sneaking out of school using a stolen set of keys and going to a nearby aunt’s house, where she would brighten his meal with a distinctly un-school-lunch-like small glass of port.

The lawyer’s final distinguishing trait, besides his Norse vegvisir tattoo and strong sense of patriotism, is a love of foreign shores – especially those of the Middle East. He feels “very happy” under those other skies.