Not all superheroes wear capes - some wear gowns
For Spiderman it was a bite from a radioactive spider, the Incredible Hulk it exposure to gamma rays, and Superman gained his new powers simply by entering Planet Earth’s atmosphere. Savantha De Saram, Managing Parter at Sri Lankan law firm D.L. & F. De Saram, believes his law firm gained their superpowers by joining Lex Mundi in 2018.
“For us, being a member of Lex Mundi is like being part of one global law firm and that is very powerful when you are approaching any type of new business opportunity,” explains De Saram. “Knowing that we have the full support and back-up of the whole network means we can be totally fearless in any business opportunity that we go for or in any business situation that our clients face. It is like having a superpower.
“When a client comes to see us and says they are looking to get into a new country and ask whether we know anybody in that country who can help them, within two minutes we can have an email sent off to the Lex Mundi member in that jurisdiction, and we know we will get an immediate response offering help and expertise. It is invaluable for us and for our clients to be able to quickly contact somebody on the ground that we know and we trust in a jurisdiction many miles away.”
In Sri Lanka D.L. & F. De Saram has always been considered a top three or four law firm, but joining Lex Mundi has further enhanced our stature in the market and during our membership of Lex Mundi the outreach has been very positive for us.
Savantha De Saram Senior Partner
D.L. & F. De Saram has been successfully operating since the firm was launched by founder Richard De Saram in 1898 – making it one of the oldest law firms in Sri Lanka. The firm has evolved into a forward-thinking and modern law firm that employs 110 people - 41 lawyers and 11 partners at the time of writing. Savantha is particularly proud that eight of those 11 partners are female, and he is committed to ensuring that diversity and equality are important values that run through the culture of his firm.
Savantha is the fifth generation of the De Saram family to take on the management of the firm, a responsibility he took up in April 2018, alongside his brother Prabash De Saram. During their time in charge the brothers have set about growing the firm, modernising its structure and professionalising how the firm operates in terms of managing and servicing its growing client list. The brothers have expanded their practice, with infrastructure, cross-border financing and commercial transactions, mergers and acquisitions and capital markets being areas of particularly impressive growth.
“In Sri Lanka D.L. & F. De Saram has always been considered a top three or four law firm,” says Savantha, “but joining Lex Mundi has further enhanced our stature in the market and during our membership of Lex Mundi the outreach has been very positive for us,” says De Saram.
“As an example, professionalised law firm culture was previously quite rare here in Sri Lanka in terms of monitoring client response times, managing and developing existing and new clients, how we manage data, utilising technology and so on. Traditionally business culture in Sri Lanka was very laid back. In many ways the lawyer/client relationship was like that of a doctor/client relationship, as in you’d only really see clients when something was wrong.
The ability for our lawyers to understand economics - macro and micro – is very important here. When our lawyers represent our firm they are also representing our country, so having a solid understanding of our economy, and what is driving that, is important.
“But being part of the network, by meeting and talking to other managing partners from all around the world has enabled us to learn and adopt many of the professional practices and processes that are common in more advanced legal markets. That has been a huge benefit for our firm, for our people and especially for our clients.
“It has helped us to elevate our firm, modernise the way we operate and improve how our partners service clients and build our business as a result. It has been a massive learning curve for us, and we have had clients bring their business to us from other firms simply because we have the capability through Lex Mundi to support them in other global markets.”
As part of his initiatives to modernise D.L. & F. De Saram and make it the firm that ambitious young lawyers want to be a part of, Savantha has introduced a revenue-share scheme, which he says is already paying dividends.
“Until the late 90’s we were generally considered a family law firm,” says Savantha, “but since then we have become quite a large general practice firm with a large corporate practice, a strong employment practice, we have banking and finance, Real Estate, IT, IP and we work across pretty much every area of modern law for local and international clients. There are both positives and negatives to being a family law firm. It is a real positive to be able to tell the market that we are a fifth-generation family law firm. That can almost be quite romantic from a marketing perspective and gives us real genuine heritage and expertise in our market.
“But I suppose one negative is that our equity partners are all family members, which is common in Sri Lankan law firms. If young lawyers believe they cannot progress to equity partner level at De Saram, then that can deter the best talent from wanting to join our firm. To counter that we introduced a new structure and a mechanism that is essentially a revenue share scheme. So, now we have four governing equity partners, but the whole partnership benefit from the firm growing and doing good business.”
Initiatives such as this, alongside the firm’s on-going commitment to sustainable business practices – plastics are banned from the office - is now helping the firm attract the best legal talent in the region and is very much paving the way for progressive young lawyers to lead the firm into the next generation.
Savantha says: “The ability for our lawyers to understand economics - macro and micro – is very important to us here at our firm. When our lawyers represent our firm they are also representing our country, so having a solid understanding of our economy, and what is driving that, is important. Our lawyers can then use their knowledge to help our clients be as commercially successful as they can be here in Sri Lanka and beyond in global markets.”