Tell me a bit of the background of how got the managing partner role in this firm.

They decided to open in Caracas in 1997, the decision was made in Canada. I was approached very early on, maybe when the office had been open four or five months to join. I had been almost 10 years in a major international firm, Baker & McKenzie, here in Venezuela and had also worked in a couple of their U.S. offices. . . . I ended up joining early 1998.

At the time, when the office opened, which would be traditional for any firm opening in a foreign country, they sent in a Canadian resident managing partner. As the office grew, we started off four people including him, Glenn [Faass], myself and a couple of other Venezuelan lawyers, and now we have over 100 people; total professionals is close to 60, and the rest is staff.

After a number of years, the office in Canada felt it was time for Glenn to move on to somewhere else, and, two, the office was quite large and independent enough to have its own managing partner from within. Being the most senior of the partners here, and for whatever other reasons (I had already been in one of the firm’s two management committees for three years.) . . . Then they thought that it would be the natural evolution for me to become the managing partner here, so I have been for the last two or so years.

How do you split your time between practising and management duties?

Before being made managing partner, and still today, I have one of the largest portfolios of the partners here and one of the largest worldwide. I have a very active clientele and very demanding large files that I work on.

I certainly didn’t want to give that up. So what I did was I made the commitment to do that, but my role [as managing partner] probably only consumes 30 per cent of my time. The other 70 per cent gets allocated between actual client files and my traditional marketing, publications, international conferences — all the things you do as part of your practice —continuing preparation, education, training of associates. . . . I try to do it in an organized way.

It takes at least two full hours of every day of issues that I need to deal with. But I have decentralized some things where I don’t believe I am essential. So I’m not signing cheques, I’m not picking the colour of the carpet, I’m not dealing with details on treasury unless they’re very significant. . . . I have a senior role in recruiting support when we are recruiting somebody senior but I don’t get involved in the normal run-of-the-mill recruiting.

I participate across the board in many things but see the role mainly as one of the leaders of the office, to make sure we’re always going in the right direction, to address the more sensitive issues, and to serve as a connection among all the partners to make sure that everybody that has something assigned within management that things are getting done. . . .

Are the lawyers in your office Canadian or local or a combination of the two?

Obviously we opened with a Canadian managing partner and we started off more as a satellite office. But today we are a very independent, truly Venezuelan firm. Of the 106 employees, the 106 are Venezuelan. Of the 46 lawyers we have, they are all Venezuelan, admitted in Venezuela. Therey are obviously many educated abroad and bilingual, but our core practice is in Venezuela.

What is the focus of the legal work in the Caracas office?

Our office evolved from being strictly the Venezuelan office to the regional base for Latin American work run by Macleod Dixon. . . . Obviously we do a lot of work in Venezuela as it is a very prolific country in terms of legal issues — either because of the constant change in law or the $100 oil — and, being the fifth-largest producing country in the world, there is a lot of investment and a lot of projects here, $3- to $4-billion oil projects going on.

That’s been a very important part of our work but there’s also a percentage of our work that is dedicated at being a leading Latin American energy and resources firm in particular. In Venezuela we are definitely full-service, but when you look at what we do in Colombia, or large projects in Mexico or in Peru, Guyana, Trinidad, or wherever it is, that is work that is primarily bringing in that international component of oil and gas, mining, or electricity at a very high level.

And working with local counsel in those jurisdictions to support us but we bring in the international expertise. . . . In a way, we are serving the role other American or U.K. firms are serving, meaning we’re not competing with the Colombian firms. I see it more as doing the international transactional type work that is done by a firm in Houston or Calgary, for instance.

So it’s been a great opportunity. Some projects have been two or three years and humungous, and some projects have been smaller, but we’ve been pretty much all over the region and very fascinating things.

What type of client would use the services of Macleod Dixon in Caracas?

We act for a large number of Fortune 100 companies from around the world. . . . More than 90 per cent of our clientele are multinationals. Irrespective of the sector we’re in, they’re multinationals doing business in this region, and generally we have an advantage because they feel very comfortable with a North American firm.

It’s not just the language skills. It’s the delivery, it’s the service, the way you operate, the way you write the opinions and the memos. . . . And [clients] have found it very attractive, which I guess is the reason why in less than 10 years . . . we became the second largest law firm in the country. [We] act for Chevron, PepsiCo, huge Asian companies like CNPC, the Chinese national oil company, major pharmaceutical companies (Abbott), airlines, banks (CitiBank).

In any industry we have these marquee clients. And because Venezuela is such an energy country, some of our huge clients are in fact coming from the oil world — BP, Ecopetrol, Petrobras, Chevron. In terms of Canada, we’ve acted for Petro-Canada here until they left Venezuela about a year ago. We’ve acted for other smaller junior Canadian companies, a lot of them in the mining business and others that have ventured into the oil business in Colombia. We’ve acted for Precision Drilling, a very large oil-services company.

The Canadian portion of our portfolio may be somewhere around five or six per cent [on the Venezuelan side]. The Colombian work is a lot of Canadian-listed companies investing in Colombia. So maybe total 15 per cent is Canadian-based revenue. But the other 85 per cent comes from around the world, a lot from the U.S. and Europe but also Asia and Latin America. It’s very diversified.