Font Size: 
Kilpatrick Stockton Expands to Mideast
Fulton County Daily Report
November 07, 2008
Image: Getty Images
Kilpatrick Stockton has opened a small Dubai office to expand its construction practice into the Middle East. The two-lawyer office is starting with several U.S. clients that also are newcomers to the region, with the goal of also representing local participants in the frenzied Gulf construction boom.
"Dubai is at the heart of the most successful economic region in the world right now. We think it will continue to be a growth engine in the world economy, given the oil revenues and the focus on building the region to diversify wealth," said Thomas P. Wilson, the Kilpatrick partner who's relocated from Atlanta to Dubai to open the office. "It's more than a boomtown."
Senior associate Drew D. Baiter and his family also moved to Dubai from Atlanta over the summer. The office, which has two staff, received its local operating license in August, said Wilson.
Randall F. Hafer, the head of Kilpatrick's construction and infrastructure projects group, said the firm has no immediate plans to expand its foothold in the Middle East into a full-service operation. Instead the focus is on expanding its practice advising construction designers, contractors, developers and owners throughout the region.
Kilpatrick's Dubai office is the first fruit of the firm's new expansion strategy, crafted in 2007 after Diane L. Prucino and William E. Dorris became the firm's co-leaders, said Hafer. The focus is on expanding the firm's footprint based on practice strengths, instead of targeting locations for full-service branch offices. Dorris, incidentally, is a construction litigator.
Kilpatrick opened its last new office in New York four years ago, also with two lawyers. That office, with about 20 lawyers now, has a strong intellectual property focus, but also offers other services. Kilpatrick has two other offices outside the U.S., in Stockholm and London.
"We decided to grow the construction and infrastructure practice in the United States and internationally," said Hafer. "Dubai and the Middle East are probably the largest construction site in the world right now. That's where it's all happening."
Wilson said the firm's work advising the American University in Cairo on the development and construction of its new campus in Egypt "opened our eyes to the need for such services in the region." Rosser International Inc., an Atlanta-based architecture, engineering and project management firm, is another client in the Middle East, where the construction practice has been doing work for about three years, said Wilson.
After many trips to Dubai and numerous conversations with construction consultants, other lawyers and potential clients over the last couple of years, said Hafer, he and his team decided there was room in the rapidly crowding Dubai legal market for their services. "There were other firms doing all kinds of legal work, but we found that there weren't many, or any, offering business-focused solutions to construction disputes," he said.
"There are a lot of them to be resolved over there," he added.
King & Spalding is the only other Atlanta-based firm with a Dubai office, which it launched almost two years ago and followed with offices in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and Abu Dhabi, U.A.E. The offices -- with a total of 23 lawyers -- have a busy Islamic finance practice and also offer construction and projects services.
Several of Kilpatrick's initial Dubai clients are U.S. companies in the construction industry, said Hafer, who also are new to the region. He declined to name any, saying most have not yet officially announced their presence there.
Wilson said he and Baiter are advising companies on contracts, regulatory and corporate issues, but they want their focus to be on helping clients work out disputes with their business partners outside of court, through negotiation, mediation and arbitration. The two can't litigate locally, Wilson noted, since the local courts are only open to local lawyers.
"We learned very quickly last year that you have to be there to get business from developers, the local governments and other people working there. The culture is such that when a client decides to hire you, they want to be looking at you across the table and know that you're there for the long haul," said Hafer.
Kilpatrick will officially announce itself to the Mideast market on Nov. 19 with a launch party at its office in Dubai, located in the Monarch Office Tower at One Sheikh Zayed Road.
