Financial attorney Haley L. Rebel likes to remind people that lawyers can do a great deal more than just litigate.
"Making deals is fun," Rebel said. "Creating new deals and new business is in the exciting form of the legal industry, right? It's not the 'We're fighting with each other; we hate each other' [phase]. It's still the exciting engagement to the marriage phase before you ever get to the divorce."
In 2013, Rebel spent a summer clerking at Styskal, Wiese & Melchione LLP (SW&M) and then joined the Glendale financial boutique as an associate after she graduated from Loyola Law School in 2014. She made partner in 2019 and now heads up the firm's fintech and technology practice.
"I'm primarily negotiating contracts for financial institutions for various aspects of the technology they utilize," she explained.
Rebel said her passion for transactional work was first sparked in law school.
"I knew at that point I'd much rather focus on keeping clients out of trouble instead of solving the problem after the problem occurred," she recalled. "One of the fun benefits of transactional law and the legal guidance you can provide is keeping clients out of trouble instead of always being adversarial in that dispute resolution process."
SW&M managing partner Steven V. Balian joined the firm in 1998 after a few years tackling both transactional work and litigation.
"I quickly realized I liked the transactional side better," he recalled. "Instead of getting a motion at five o'clock on a Friday and spending my weekend working on it, I could toast champagne and have people celebrate a merger or acquisition. ... Bringing people together and bringing their business together and building it and seeing the success they had - it was really great."
Balian joined SW&M in large part because the firm focused on transactional law, and he said he's personally worked on more than 500 credit union mergers over the past 26 years.
"We are a full-service firm for financial institutions," Balian explained. "We do our best to understand what they do and how they do it, so we can serve them."
Balian noted that most of SW&M's clients are credit unions, but the firm also works regularly with state and community banks, assisting with everything from HR to state and federal regulatory compliance to contractual agreements with third-party technology vendors and even intellectual property matters.
First opened in 1936, SW&M is now home to 15 attorneys licensed not only in California but also states like Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Florida, Washington and Oregon, according to Balian.
"We've really worked on taking our practice from financial institutions in the LA area up through Northern California and ultimately nationwide," Balian said. "And I think we're always looking to grow, but we don't want to sacrifice service, quality or responsiveness."
Rebel noted, meanwhile, that SW&M's credit union clients oversee a substantial chunk of the nation's wealth.
"We represent clients that represent about 20% of the assets in the United States," Rebel said. "For a 15-attorney law firm, that's a lot of assets. We're touching a lot of different institutions, who are touching a lot of people, and I feel like we really do create a big impact on the financial services industry."
Wescom Credit Union General Counsel Carina K. Hollis has worked for 10 years with SW&M attorneys, and she said the firm has a "breadth of different specialties."
"For example, mergers and acquisitions - Steve is the go-to guy for that," Hollis said. "He knows everything you need to know - from the client perspective and from the regulatory approval perspective."
Hollis added that she's worked often in recent years with Rebel on contract negotiations with third-party tech providers that yielded some unexpected results.
"I think in the industry, there was this defeated mindset when it comes to negotiating vendor contracts with big core processors, big technology vendors," Hollis said. "And Haley really shifted that dynamic. It's the first time I've seen really valuable negotiations on [our behalf] and really getting some wins in what we thought were non-negotiable deals."
Rebel said she really enjoys the role technology plays in her practice.
"It's an area that's ever evolving," she explained. "There's always something new coming out. There are always people trying new things - not only new regulation but just new technology. And it's just a pace that continues to grow and get faster, and I don't think that's going to stop anytime soon."
Hollis said she routinely turns to Rebel for guidance when dealing with something new.
"Anytime there's a new, cutting-edge area of law that's under development, and we have an interest in it, she is my go-to," Hollis said, noting that Rebel helped Wescom finalize a name, image and likeness (NIL) deal last year with the UCLA women's basketball team.
"That was brand new; the NCAA rules had just been finalized," Hollis recalled. "So, it was like, 'How can we do this? How can we structure this?' And she was instrumental in getting us to where we ended up with that deal."