GLOBAL PRESENCE
Top five offices New York Hq | London | Menlo Park, Ca | Hong Kong | Tokyo
Total attorneys 656
Major departments/practices Corporate | Tax | Litigation
First-year salary $125,000
2001 summer associates 102
2001 fall first-years 95
Who to call Bonnie Hurry, Director of Recruiting and Legal Staff Services, 212-450-4143
Web site davispolk.com
Got a hankering for Hong Kong? A lust for London? Davis Polk & Wardwell is your passport to practicing abroad. Through a major initiative undertaken over the past five years, the 656-lawyer New York-based firm has become a dominant legal player in Europe and Asia.
Davis Polk consistently ranks near the top among worldwide law firms in the number of foreign equity offerings it handles. Looking east, DP lawyers recently worked on two of the three largest IPOs in China and three of the five largest equity offerings in Japan. To the west, the firm’s Spanish corporate clients represent more than 50 percent of that country’s public market in terms of company value. The Spanish corporate practice has become so important that the firm recently announced the opening of a Madrid office, its sixth foreign outpost. DP’s five other offices abroad span the globe from Paris to Tokyo. All told, lawyers in the firm’s various international offices handled 15 public offerings in 2000 worth more than $1 billion.
The firm’s broad international reach means opportunities to live and work in new and exotic places. It also means the chance to shape business in rapidly evolving economies. And, given the importance of foreign business to Davis Polk’s growth strategy, it means excellent long-term career opportunities. At some firms, being shipped overseas can throw an associate off the partnership track. At DP, international work is viewed as a partnership plus. Some 60 percent of the partners in the non-U.S. offices were made partner in the past six years, and many of them were working abroad at the time.
Davis Polk’s commitment to international law starts early. Every year, about a dozen summer associates get the chance to spend one month in a foreign office. Barbora Moring summered with the firm in 2000 and spent four weeks in Frankfurt. Both summer associates and full-fledged attorneys are encouraged to express their wanderlust; the firm will do what it can to accommodate. Jeanette Redmond, a fourth-year associate, moved with her husband to Hong Kong for a year in 2000. “It was an exotic place that we would never have lived in otherwise,” she says. “The work and the client contact were extraordinary.”
Moring, who started full-time with Davis Polk in September, enjoyed her time abroad so much, she made a point of asking to go back to Frankfurt. In January, she shipped out to that office for a two-year commitment.
Also Consider
Sullivan & Cromwell (sullcrom.com) markets itself as “an international law firm,” and indeed it is. With offices from London and Frankfurt to Melbourne and Beijing, 650-plus-lawyer S&C handles some of the world’s most complex global transactions.
