Davis LLP's Expansion Plans and Aggressive Recruiting Campaign Draw Attention

Published: Tuesday, 13 February 2007

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First published in The Globe and Mail, February 14, 2007 | Beppi Crosarol

Davis Makes its Pitch for Partners

Few people know better than Doug Buchanan how hard it can be to crack Toronto's congested legal market. The managing partner of Davis & Company , one of British Columbia's largest and most venerable firms, first planted a stake on Bay Street in 1996 in the hope of competing head-to-head with emerging national counterparts.
More than a decade later, Mr. Buchanan concedes he's still toiling below the radar. "We're painfully aware that we're at a disadvantage, brand-wise."

Having grown to just 35 lawyers, the firm's Toronto office has lagged well behind more aggressive, come-from-away rivals such as Montreal's Ogilvy Renault LLP and Heenan Blaikie LLP and Calgary's Bennett Jones LLP, each with more than 100 lawyers in the city, many of them marquee names in the mergers and acquisitions world.

Then there were the missed deals. Mr. Buchanan says Davis was caught woefully off guard by one of the country's biggest business trends of recent years. "We missed the income trusts," he said.

Rather than calling for a retreat, the Vancouver firm is hoping to seize the momentum of some significant recent hires and push ahead with a new marketing strategy to build a bigger presence in Toronto. It's goal: To lead the local market in unglamorous bricks-and-mortar niches such as infrastructure-project financing, municipal law and cross-border work involving its traditional foreign strength, Japanese companies.

The linchpin in Davis's unconventional new marketing offensive is a name few players on Bay Street are likely to recognize, Caroline Carnerie. The lawyer and former Toronto consultant with legal recruiter ZSA three months ago became the firm's first national director of professional recruitment. In that role she will have the rare distinction for an in-house legal recruiter of scouting exclusively for marquee talent at the partner level. By contrast, her counterparts at most other firms tend to devote the bulk of their time to associate recruitment and retention, leaving the superstar hiring to professional agencies.

Ms. Carnerie's first bold step has been to launch an advertising campaign designed to play up the firm's culture of independence as well as to tap a perceived vein of disaffection among senior lawyers at national firms. In one version of the ad, four people in business suits stand, robot-rigid, inside waist-high cardboard boxes strewn around a field. "Partners, feeling a little boxed in?" reads the caption, currently running in law-trade journals. "Explore the Davis difference."

Such blanket calls-for-partners are common in England but virtually unheard of in Canada, where ads tend to highlight specific vacancies and are usually placed discreetly by outside recruitment agencies.

It was Ms. Carnerie, too, who worked her extensive contacts to intercept the firm's latest senior recruit, Eric Belli-Bivar, just as the banking veteran from Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP was about to accept an offer from another firm.

"I was in Toronto, it was 2 o'clock and Caroline called and said there's a guy who fits the description we wanted," Mr. Buchanan recalled. "I said, 'Caroline, find out if I can meet this guy before 4:30 this afternoon.' " The upshot? Mr. Belli-Bivar showed up at 4 p.m. and the pair hit it off.

Mr. Belli-Bivar joins a half dozen other new faces in the Toronto office, including three partners lured away from major London-based firms, Tobor Emakpor of DLA Piper Rudnick, Andrew Burton of Slaughter & May and Ian Bendell of CMS Cameron McKenna. More recently, in December, the firm hired Samuel Schwartz, a top corporate-commercial partner with Goodman and Carr LLP.

What's the Davis draw for such senior recruits? In Mr. Belli-Bivar's case, there was the desire to feel part of a team "in ascendancy." But he also became sold on the 220-lawyer firm's lean structure and the prospect of offering clients something unthinkable at his old firm, a significantly reduced rate.

"Clients are pushing back on the $700, $800-an-hour thing," he said. "I'll be able to push work out to [lower-billing] Vancouver associates because they have capacity and the client saves a third off the bill."

Despite Davis's modest Bay Street profile, Mr. Buchanan says the 115-year-old firm, with satellite offices in Calgary, Edmonton, Whitehorse, Yellowknife, Montreal and Tokyo, has been closing some of its biggest deals in history, largely in the burgeoning area of public-private partnerships (or P3s). Most notably, it acted for SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. in a joint venture to build a $1.9-billion rapid-transit line linking Vancouver to its airport and the suburb of Richmond, and for Bilfinger Berger BOT Inc., Germany's second-largest engineering firm, in a $1.05-billion deal to build and operate the Golden Ears Bridge project in southern British Columbia.

While both deals were western-based and financed out of England, Mr. Buchanan says they affirm his strategy of maintaining a Toronto presence. "I don't think a stand-alone Vancouver firm could do these deals," he said. "I don't think you can be taken seriously as a law firm if you don't have an office in Toronto."

Another reason the firm has no choice but to expand in Toronto, Mr. Buchanan says, is to serve the company's stable of increasingly active Japanese manufacturing clients in Ontario. The strong Japanese connection dates back to the postwar era, when Davis successfully sued the federal government for expelling Japanese-Canadians, many of them British Columbia residents, under the War Measures Act. Mr. Buchanan, 56, a former Olympic hockey player and member of the Vancouver Canucks farm system, himself is fluent in Japanese, a skill he acquired playing for a Japanese league during the 1970s.

His ultimate goal? To more than double the Toronto office's size to between 70 and 80 lawyers within two years.

It's a plan with its share of skeptics, to be sure. Mainly, they say Davis lacks the deep pockets to lure top-tier talent, particularly in the world of big-money transactions. "You have to be prepared to be aggressive in a very aggressive marketplace," said one industry consultant.

Mr. Buchanan concedes it won't be a cakewalk. "We're working off $250 lumber, not $70 oil," he said, contrasting Davis's base in the mature forestry industry versus Bennett Jones's growing oil-based war chest. "It means we have to be razor sharp in identifying new emerging areas, and the P3 world is one of them. We saw it coming and we prepared ourselves and we nailed it."