Gerard Mazet was the senior partner of once dominant Jeantet&Associés, and his decision to join the Paris office of Wall Street’s mighty Sullivan&Cromwell shook his old firm to its foundations.
To the outside world, his move was seen as the most significant sign yet that a new order is emerging among Paris lawyers, one that does not have Jeantet and rival Gide Loyrette Nouel as its leading lights.
The very fact that S&C had made such a daring move also struck a chord, as Mazet was the firm’s first lateral-hire partner in its illustrious 122-year history. He was soon joined at S&C by his respected colleague at Jeantet, head of tax Jean-Pierre Le Gall, and by capital markets expert Richard Villanova from the Paris office of Benelux giant Stibbe Simont Monaham Duhot.
With over 30 years of his life tied up with Jeantet, Mazet was reluctant to explain his decision while working out his notice, but on January 1 he started at his new firm, moved into his new office and relaxed.
“For the time being the only difference is that my mess, which was strewn across my office at Jeantet, has not moved over with me,” he says. “But I’m sure it will follow me over and then I will feel totally at home.”
Mazet led Jeantet through one of the most challenging periods in its entire history. When he joined the firm as an associate in 1966, some 95% of its work derived from advising US companies investing in France. Its reliance on this flow of work was diluted as French businesses gradually increased their use of outside lawyers in the 1970s and 1980s and turned to Jeantet and Gide as the counsel of choice.
The firm also actively broadened its base of business contacts, so that today only about one third is US-sourced, with the rest split equally between France and the rest of the world.
With the focus very much on international cross-border legal advice, as Mazet rose in influence within the firm he began to advocate the benefit of developing closer ties with continental European firms. This would allow Jeantet to offer prized foreign clients a one-stop package of legal services covering the larger European jurisdictions.
In 1989 Mazet won the approval of his fellow partners to set up the Alliance of European Lawyers: a network of leading firms in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Belgium that had the implicit goal of merging to form an elite continental European firm. The plan was that this giant could then take over an English or US firm at its leisure.
As it turned out, in 1998 leading English firm Linklaters&Paines was invited to join the party. But to protect its higher profitability, Linklaters’ senior management insisted on a measured integration with the Alliance members over several years to allow the firms’ finances to harmonize. (A similarly cautious approach to European integration was adopted in the same year by the UK’s chancellor of the exchequer.)
Linklaters won over all but the Spanish member firm – Uria&Menendez – and Jeantet. They opted to retain their independence while Linklaters pushed ahead and created the 1,800-lawyer Linklaters&Alliance.
“A step-by-step merger was not the right approach, at least in our case,” says Mazet. “If you don’t do things to start with, it becomes more difficult when you have become friends.”
With hindsight his concern appears valid, as Linklaters&Alliance has had to slow down the integration of its member firms further than even Linklaters would have liked. It has now been forced to negotiate merger terms on a bilateral basis for any progress to be made at all.
With Mazet at the helm, Jeantet spent the next two years arguing over whether to merge with a top-tier international firm or remain independent. The firm as a whole agreed it had to improve its profit-ability and began selling off its non-core international practices and pushed out underperforming partners.
It had made sufficient progress by 1999 for its remaining partners to be earning enough not to be tempted away by the large sums of cash being offered by the expanding English firms in the city.
Compatriot Gide failed to follow Jeantet’s lead and lost as much as a third of its partnership during that 12-month period, including key rainmakers such as M&A specialist Thierry Vassogne. Vassogne took his team to Linklaters in Paris, filling the gap in its local legal expertise caused by Jeantet’s decision a year earlier.
But the decision eating away at Jeantet – whether to surrender its independence or not – remained.
Mazet, whose practice remained predominantly cross-border, joined by a small section of Jeantet’s partners, advocated the merits of a merger deal if the right firm could be found. Lengthy merger negotiations were conducted with the US firm White&Case during 2000, but the substantial bulk of partners remained reluctant to pursue the strategy, even if they agreed with it in principle. “On mergers, it was ‘maybe that what’s we ought to do rather than that’s what we would love to do’,” says Mazet.
Some, such as up and coming corporate star Sebastien Prat, did not want the firm to merge at all and on learning of the merger talks he jumped ship to his father’s respected boutique firm, Bredin Prat.
Mazet admits the discussions “did not make everyone happy” and by early October he had to call them off, realizing a deal could not be struck.
Then the approach from S&C materialized and Mazet chose to leave.
“I really feel a firm like Jeantet can do well, perhaps doing more French work,” he says. “It is clear that the work has to be of high quality as it is the only way to have an interesting professional life and remain profitable. But the purely French work is becoming more exciting as the French clients are using more services. Large mergers, restructurings, privatizations – all these things that were not handled by outside law firms before. There will be a certain reshuffling. There are those that find business litigation particularly interesting – they also tend to be the more individualistic lawyers – and they will not want to join a foreign firm.”
And what about those lawyers like him whose practice is predominantly cross-border and transaction-based? “The tools I have developed over the years I can no doubt use better at Sullivan&Cromwell than at Jeantet,” he says. He appears to be feeling at home, even without his mess.
