Philadelphia-based Royer Cooper Cohen Braunfeld has created a new position that it hopes will help create more business for both the firm and its clients.

Beth Cohen is Royer Cooper's new director of business strategy and innovation. A lawyer with a master's of business administration, Cohen is also counsel at the firm. In addition to her client work, she is taking on a strategic role within the law firm, working with the executive committee.

Cohen comes from Greenberg Traurig, where she spent five years as director of global emerging growth services, working closely with business clients on their expansion strategies, including international growth. Royer Cooper, with 33 lawyers, recently launched an international practice.

In her new role, Cohen will advise clients on legal issues but will not work directly on transactions her clients are completing. That leaves her more time to assist in brainstorming, she said, as well as getting the client introduced to other useful contacts the firm is able to provide.

“I actually have time to read the business plan,” she said.

Royer Cooper executive partner Neil Cooper said his firm crafted the role with inspiration from clients, as well as knowing Cohen's background. In addition to her law firm practice, she has worked on the client side at several companies as general counsel, international counsel and even vice president of strategic business development.

Her new role presents “an opportunity to not only work with clients on their needs, their business needs and help them with their strategy … but also to help the firm continue to enhance that direction,” Cooper said. 

At Greenberg Traurig, Cohen mainly represented emerging technology companies, and much of her work was national and international, including helping foreign businesses enter the U.S. market. At Royer Cooper, she said she will be more focused on entrepreneurial projects.

Cohen said she expects to spend “a significant amount of time” on the law firm's strategy as well. Cooper said combining the client-facing aspects of Cohen's role and the law firm strategy aspects was not just a factor of the firm's size. Having the same person in those two functions is useful, he said.

“We view our firm in some ways as an emerging growth business. We think of ourselves as entrepreneurs,” Cooper said. “What's good for us is good for our clients and vice versa.”

Cohen is the second lawyer from Greenberg Traurig to join Royer Cooper in recent months. David Gitlin, who had also spent five years at Greenberg Traurig, joined Royer Cooper in June. He has since helped the firm to launch an international practice.