Triple play at Torys
Miller walks, Hines balks, Berg docks
It
seems Dorsey & Whitney has picked
off, er, picked up Dan Miller, a securities practitioner, from the New York office of Torys. Mr. Miller, who is Canadian, will be moving to Dorseys Vancouver office where he will practice U.S. law with his eye squarely on Calgary.
Mr. Miller, while 34 and just an associate at Torys, is something of a known entity in cross- border securities. He has a good relationship with Encana. And with PetroCanada. He’s been the point person on the U.S. end of four Petro-Canada deals over the past two years, working with Andy Beck, including the $ 900- million debt financing. Craig Story, a pal from U of T days, was on the other side of that deal while still with Fraser Milner. Mr. Story is now at Stikeman Elliott, and we suspect it won’t take Mr. Miller very long to get in touch. His clients also include Paramount Resources and several other energy trusts.
Great list, so who’s their mama, Torys or Mr. Miller? We suspect a few things.
We suspect some of Encana’s U. S. work will travel, Mr. Miller’s been doing its Sarbanes compliance since 2002, but we suspect Petro-Canada, a longtime Torys client, isn’t going anywhere fast.
We also suspect Les Viner, Torys managing partner, and Peter Jewett, the face of its corporate group, have been working the phones madly talking up Josh Goldstein, a securities associate hired in New York this summer from Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom.
Mr. Goldstein caught the eye of Jamie Scarlett, Kevin Morris and a couple of others when Torys worked with Skadden on a cross-border trust transaction a couple of years ago. He may be familiar to some people at Gowlings and McCarthy Tétrault from that $276-million VSA trust deal and to people at Blake Cassels & Graydon and Osler Hoskin & Harcourt from Telus’s $6.75-billion cross-border note offering a couple of years back.
But back to Mr. Miller. We understand Chris Barry, who is spearheading Dorsey & Whitney’s Canadian operations, had been trying to land him for about five years dating back to the days Mr. Miller was with the Canada group at Paul Weiss. It didn’t work out because his wife, a doctor, had a residency in New York and Dorsey & Whitney didn’t have a slot in its New York office. Torys wanted him as well so off to Torys New York he went, where he and Mr. Beck formed the U.S. securities group.
Why leave now? Well, there is partnership. Mr. Miller also grew up in Vancouver, where Dorsey & Whitney has a tiny (read: two-person) office, so it’s a return home for him and his young family. And his client base is pretty much in Calgary and Vancouver. Torys doesn’t have an office in either city.
That’s all very heartwarming, but it’s only part of the story.
The buzz on the Street in Calgary is more than a few people have told Mr. Miller they’d love to work with him but have concerns about bringing Torys into the U.S. end of a deal out of fear the firm would try to poach the Canadian end of the work.
“ The way a lot of that U. S. work comes in is through referrals from Canadian law firms,” says someone who plays in the cross-border sandbox. Mo t i o n s “It’s the same for everyone.
“People at whatever firm, say Bennett Jones just to pick a name, understandably would be worried about using Torys, especially now that B-J has a Toronto office, although the truth is it would probably never happen.”
We have it on the highest authority that it would indeed never happen because trying to poach a client through a referral “ would violate expected standards of civility and wouldn’t be businesslike.”
It would also be a clear violation of Section 33.7 (xvii) of The Code setting out the protocols governing treatment of Referring Firms. For the non-lawyer, that’s the kiss-of-death clause that says: “Never nip, snip, snap, munch or crunch the hand of any provider of grub, meals, snacks, victuals or clients lest they withdraw the end part of their arm and start warning their friends to do the same.”
Clearly, at Dorsey & Whitney, poaching through referrals is not an issue — although referring to poaching, we point you to the release announcing Mr. Miller’s arrival. Dorsey & Whitney says towards the end that the firm works closely with its clients’ Canadian solicitors “to provide seamless cross-border legal services.” That phrase is hauntingly familiar. Can’t think from where. OUT WITH THE NEW, IN WITH
THE OLD, AS CMO BOLTS
You’ve heard of the Runaway Bride? How about the Runaway PR Guy? It seems Chris Hines, Torys new chief marketing officer, turned tail and headed back to Ernst & Young Canada where he is, er, was, er, is national director of business development. All this happened a scant four days before he was supposed to start his new job at Torys. Oh dear.
Mr. Hines had apparently met the firm’s key partners and staff. He had resigned from E& Y. Torys had announced his hiring. He was over at his former firm supposedly working out his notice period when he informed Torys that he’d changed his mind. It’s not clear what happened to spark such a last- minute change of heart.
“I can only guess E&Y showed him a lot of love, that would be a businessman’s assessment of what happened,” says one player.
Gee, we can only guess they also showed him a lot of staff, from what we hear something in the area of about 60 people. At Torys he would have had 12. A smaller staff is quite acceptable when accompanied by smaller expectations, so it’s a shame the two are so rarely seen together. We wouldn’t be astonished if the sheer volume of job he was taking on suddenly hit Mr. Hines — clearly later than it should.
Anyhow, about three seconds after the note went around Torys saying he wasn’t coming, another e-mail was sent to Patty Grimes, the longtime marketing director, coaxing her back. She may be shy but she’s not retiring.
Ms. Grimes — who has been attempting to quit work since March — has repeatedly postponed her plans while Les Viner and Trip Dorkey, chairman of the New York office, interviewed so many candidates in Toronto and New York they put themselves in real danger of developing repetitive strain of the mandible.
She is back again for three days a week while Messrs. Viner and Dorkey resume the search. (Note to Ms. Grimes: This may not be a bad thing. As someone once said, retirement means twice as much husband and half as much money.)
One wonders whether Torys knows headhunters have been beating the bushes for a chief marketing officer at two other major Canadian law firms. It would be indiscreet to say who, of course, but the first name of one puts us in mind of Baskin-Robbins, while the first name of the other is the same as a famous downtown Montreal department store. We shall say no more.
One final note at Torys, the firm has added Michael Berg, a 20-year patent guy, to its New York office giving it the ability to offer U. S. patent opinions on medical and biotech. Strategy, patent opinions, litigation support and litigation strategy are the holy quartet.
“Every biotech company, more than a any other kind of company, needs a U.S. strategy from the get go,” says one insider. “ The most important patents are in the U.S., the market is in the U.S., the financing is in the U. S., and now we really have a full cross-border strategy, which puts us in a league of our own for the Canadian companies and makes us able to compete in the U. S., also.”
We’re told it’s a coup because it’s tough to get experienced medical patent guys in New York. They apparently cluster in Boston, Washington and California. In fact, Mr. Berg was managing partner of Finley & Berg, a San Francisco IP boutique he helped set up, for the past 10 years before being recalled to New York for family reasons. Now that’s the type of life sciences we can understand.
Turns out while he was contemplating where to land he was doing some U.S. IP work for Pfizer and ran intoConor McCourt, who was doing some Canadian IP work for Pfizer.