Bryant Edwards, '81: Adventuresome Leader Takes Risks to Grow Practice and Firm
During law school, Bryant Edwards, ’81, had his sights set on a Wall Street lawyering job. Then he met some lawyers from a small Los Angeles firm with about 175 attorneys, and he liked what he saw in them. After visiting the firm’s offices, he liked it even more. “It was a departure from what I had been imagining for myself, but I could tell that these were top-quality lawyers with big ambitions, and I believed they had the ability to realize those ambitions,” he recalls. “So I took a chance, and after graduation I headed west to join Latham & Watkins.”
Today, Latham is one of the world’s largest and most prestigious firms, and Edwards has made significant contributions to that growth and that stature. He chaired the corporate practice at the Los Angeles office, then dramatically grew the European practice as chair of the London corporate department for eight years, then led the creation of Latham’s Middle East practice, serving as its Dubai-based chair and opening four new offices in the region, and now he’s chairing the firm’s five-office Asia practice from Hong Kong.At each stop, he has deployed notable leadership skills as well as a deep expertise in capital markets, high-yield bonds, restructuring, and mergers and acquisitions. When he transferred to the London office in 2000, it had about 40 lawyers, and Latham had little name recognition there. Today the office has seven times as many lawyers, and Latham is a go-to brand.
“The high-yield market in Europe, which had really just begun around 1998, fell very hard in 2001 and 2002,” he recalls. “Practically everyone thought that party was over.” Persisting, he led the development of the European High Yield Association and became its chair. When the market roared back, Latham was at its forefront. In 2006, a European competitor remarked, “When you’re in high-yield at Latham & Watkins, the business comes to you. At other firms, you go do lunch in Warsaw.”
A similar story unfolded after he took the firm into the Middle East in 2008. Things had been booming—and then, when the global economic crisis hit, they went the other way. Among the many large projects that Edwards led was the restructuring of nearly $60 billion of debt obligations of Dubai World. As things turned positive again, he led the development of the high-yield market in the region and advised clients on transactions that included the Middle East’s first-ever conventional high-yield corporate bond offering and the issuance of a $4 billion sukuk by the State of Qatar, the largest dollar-denominated sukuk ever issued. (A sukuk is a financial instrument structured in accordance with Islamic principles.)
In Asia, he anticipates the same strong growth that he oversaw in Europe and the Middle East: “There is tremendous economic vitality throughout Asia and increasingly strong connections into the Middle East, Africa, and beyond. Policies are supporting the growth of strong and responsive capital markets, which will provide the capital for Asia’s most successful companies to truly globalize.” Asia-focused publications have cited the firm as among the most innovative in the Asia-Pacific region and honored him as an external counsel of the year.
“When I joined Latham, I knew I was in for a great adventure,” he says, “but the journey has been more amazing and fulfilling than I could have imagined. I was prepared for all of this at the Law School by the best legal minds of my generation, people like Posner, Easterbrook, Scalia, and Epstein, to name just some of them. I’m still inspired by that experience, and I know that today’s Law School is stronger than ever, turning out graduates with great skills, great legal logic, and the willingness to roll up their sleeves and work hard to help clients succeed. I’m a proud graduate, and a very grateful one, too.”