DLA Piper ended its long wait to seal a merger in Canada last month after partners at Vancouver-based Davis voted to become the 33rd country in the firm’s sprawling empire.
The merger, due to complete this month, will add around 250 Canadian lawyers, including 112 partners, to DLA Piper’s 4,000-lawyer operation. While it is used to seeing the international LLP of DLA making acquisitions, the deal is the largest carried out by the US LLP and the Canadian firm will operate in a verein structure with the US branch.
DLA will launch in Canada having seen talks with the country’s ‘Seven Sisters’ elite firms fall flat in recent years and an attempt to lure partners from collapsed Canadian firm Heenan Blaikie fall through in 2014.
It becomes just the fourth international firm to have a major presence in the country, following Norton Rose’s merger with Ogilvy Renault in 2011, and SNR Denton’s triple merger with Fraser Milner Casgrain and Salans in 2013, while Baker & McKenzie has had a presence in Canada since 1962.
Global co-chairman of DLA, Roger Meltzer, said he ‘took a step back after the Heenan episode’, after realising the firm had been ‘going about this the wrong way’. Following the path of Dentons and Norton Rose, Meltzer switched the firm’s attentions away from Canada’s economic capital of Toronto, where Canada’s top law firms are all headquartered, and looked west towards firms focused on the country’s heavy industries.
‘There’s a tremendous resistance to US firms for fear of giving up their very profitable referral networks.’
Roger Meltzer, DLA Piper
‘The Seven Sisters, rightly or wrongly, believe they have a lock on Toronto,’ said Meltzer. ‘There’s a tremendous resistance to US firms for fear of giving up their very profitable referral networks. We needed to look west, both to find a firm that matched our sector needs, and also to find an entrepreneurial group and not staid personalities.’
Ironically, it was in Davis’ Toronto office, a halfway house between New York-based Meltzer and Edmonton-based managing partner Robert Seidel QC, where the initial discussions took place. Meltzer said: ‘The thing that often breaks mergers is the fact that the leaders either don’t like each other very much or are sceptical of the honesty of one another. From the very beginning, Rob and I spoke very plainly.’
At the end of February the Davis partners voted through the merger to become DLA Piper Canada. Already strong in oil and gas and infrastructure, Meltzer is keen to grow in Toronto, which is already Davis’ second largest office with 40 lawyers.
He says: ‘We believe that the Toronto-based firms haven’t been wildly successful in the west, so to start in the west with a sound foundation in places like Edmonton, Vancouver and Calgary puts us in a position where we can solve the sector and practice group issues, and hopefully move east together to ultimately have a disruptive impact in Toronto.’
tom.moore@legalease.co.uk