Managing Partners: Shawn McReynolds (Toronto), Pierre-André Themens (Montréal), Richard Cherney (Montréal), Peter Glicklich (New York)
Email: info@dwpv.com
Website: www.dwpv.com
- Number of partners worldwide: 197
- Number of other partners worldwide: 45
THE FIRM: Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP is an integrated firm of more than 240 lawyers with offices in Toronto, Montréal and New York. The firm is focused on business law and is consistently at the heart of the largest and most complex commercial and financial matters on behalf of its clients, regardless of borders. Davies has the highest ratio of partners to associates of any major Canadian law firm. The firm's lawyers bring a level of commitment and collaboration consistent with their status as owners. The result is a culture of excellence and the highest percentage of top-ranked lawyers of any major Canadian firm. Perhaps that is why the National Post wrote 'When it comes to strength pound for pound, Davies has no peer'.
Core Practice Areas: Commercial real estate, competition & foreign investment review, corporate/commercial, corporate finance & securities, litigation, mergers & acquisitions, structured finance, taxation, and trusts & estates. Cross-practice and sector teams include: corporate governance, cross-border and multi-jurisdictional transactions, environmental; financial restructuring & insolvency, life sciences, pensions & benefits, private equity, infrastructure & public-private partnerships, and technology.
Market Leading Capability: As a firm, Davies is a market leader in each of its core practice areas. The firm's Mergers & Acquisitions Practice spans most industrial and service sectors and includes representation in transactions of every size. Although smaller than each of their Canadian competitors, in most cases by a considerable margin, the firm are ranked ahead of them in dollar value of M&A transactions completed over most reporting periods. Davies is consistently ranked in the top 20 by Bloomberg's Global M&A Advisory rankings.
The 2009 LEXPERT/American Lawyer Guide to the Leading 500 Lawyers in Canada ranks Davies as the leading Canadian firm in corporate transactions (including banking, competition law, corporate commercial law, corporate finance & securities, corporate tax and mergers & acquisitions) in Toronto.
Davies is recognised as the leading firm for corporate transactions in Montréal, relative to firm size. Davies' senior practitioners in each of competition, commercial real estate, tax, environmental, litigation, corporate finance & securities and corporate/commercial are recognised by independent rating agencies as leading practitioners and among the best in Canada at what they do.
Representative Transactions: A representative sample of recent matters includes: Amcor Limited in the US$2 billion acquisition of Alcan Packaging assets from Rio Tinto; Fiat S.p.A. in the US$2 billion acquisition of Chrysler LLC; Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc. in its US$50 billion merger with Bank of America; ING Group N.V. in the $2.2 billion sale of its 70% stake in ING Canada Inc; Nortel Networks UK Limited with 18 subsidiaries in the global restructuring of the Nortel group of companies and the coordination of Canadian and US insolvency proceedings; Special Committee of Patheon Inc. in its response to a US$600 million hostile insider bid made by JLL Partners Inc; Miami Access Tunnel consortium in the US$900 million Port of Miami Tunnel project; Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Limited in the $80 million acquisition of The Bank of East Asia (Canada); BCE Inc. in connection with a proposed $51.7 billion acquisition by Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, Providence Equity Partners Inc. and Madison Dearborn Partners LLC; BHP Billiton in the $147 billion proposed acquisition of Rio TintoGroup; Xstrata plc in its $24.1 billion acquisition of Falconbridge Ltd., including takeover bid litigation before the Ontario Securities Commission; Mars Inc. in the $23 billion acquisition of Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company; Delta Air Lines in the $17.7 billion merger with Northwest Airlines; Reuters Group PLC in the $17.6 billion combination with Thomson Corporation; Abitibi-Consolidated Inc. in the US$8 billion merger of equals with Bowater Incorporated; Ernst & Young Inc., a Court-appointed Monitor, in connection with the restructuring of Quebecor World Inc; PetroKazakhstan Inc. in its $4.1 billion acquisition by China National Petroleum; Fortis Inc. in the $3.7 billion acquisition of Terasen Inc; BCE Inc. in the $3.4 billion sale of Telesat Canada; Katanga Mining Ltd. in the $3.3 billion merger with Nikanor PLC; InnVest REIT in the $2.5 billion acquisition of the Legacy Hotels REIT; Special Committee of the Board of Directors of Rothmans Inc. in its $2 billion acquisition by Philip Morris International; Barrick Gold Corporation in the $1.7 billion acquisition of the remaining joint venture interest in the Cortez gold mine project; TSX Group in the $1.3 billion combination with Montréal Exchange Inc; TPG Capital in the $1.3 billion acquisition of Axcan Pharma Inc; Tata Chemicals Ltd. in the $1 billion acquisition of General Chemical Industrial Products Inc; Amcor Limited in its €430 million sale of its polyethylene terephthalate packaging operation in Europe to La Seda de Barcelona S.A.; Schlumberger Limited in its $700 million acquisition of Saxon Energy Services Inc; China Minmetals Non-Ferrous Metals and Jiangxi Copper Company in their $455 million acquisition of Northern Peru Copper; Successful takeover bid litigation arising from Osprey Media Income Fund's auction and $578 million sale to Quebecor Media Inc; The Cadillac Fairview Corporation Limited in its $86 million acquisition of the Windsor Station complex and other real estate assets from The Canadian Pacific Railway Company.
INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCE: The reach of the practice is global. Davies acts for a wide range of leading industrial and commercial companies and financial institutions, both public and private, in Canada, the United States and abroad. The firm's New York office advises Canadian, American and overseas clients on US aspects of multi-jurisdictional transactions as well as purely domestic US legal issues. Clients also include governments, regulatory bodies, charitable organisations, international agencies and educational institutions. Not only is the firm involved in most major Canadian transactions, it advises clients on transactions around the world, some of which have no Canadian component. Many international clients are directed to Davies for special purpose engagements by other North American and international law firms. Davies' integrated team approach to transactions draws on the strengths of the right lawyers wherever they are needed. The firm has assisted clients in numerous countries around the world, including among others, Argentina, Australia, Belize, Brazil, Chile, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Ghana, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Luxembourg, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
LANGUAGES: Arabic, Cantonese, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Mandarin, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian.