This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 93.186.22.112(talk) at 18:59, 9 June 2013(Remove peacock terms). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Revision as of 18:59, 9 June 2013 by 93.186.22.112(talk)(Remove peacock terms)
Bowman Gilfillan Inc is a African law firm, employing over 300 lawyers and a total staff of some 550. It is one of the "Big Five" law firms in South Africa.
Bowman Gilfillan’s main practice areas
Banking and Finance
Finance
Project Finance and Infrastructure
Debt Capital Markets
Investment management
Derivatives and structured finance
Islamic Finance
Banking and Finance litigation
Banking and finance tax
Bankruptcy, Insolvency and Restructuring
Bankruptcy, Insolvency and Restructuring Dispute Resolution
Benefits (pensions, medical and incentive schemes)
Capital Markets and Securities
Commercial Property
Competition
Construction
Corporate and Commercial
Dispute Resolution
Employment
Energy
Environmental, Natural Resources and Climate Change
Financial Services and Investment Management
Forensics and White Collar Crime
Healthcare and Pharmaceutical
Litigation and Alternative Dispute Resolution
Maritime and Transport
Mergers and Acquisitions
Mining, Resources, Energy and Environment
Oil and Gas
Private Equity
Project Finance, Infrastructure Development and Public Private Partnerships
Unless the copyright status of the text of this page or section is clarified and determined to be compatible with Wikipedia's content license, the problematic text and revisions or the entire page may be deleted one week after the time of its listing (i.e. after 15:21, 16 June 2013 (UTC)).
What can I do to resolve the issue?
If you hold the copyright to this text, you can license it in a manner that allows its use on Wikipedia.
To confirm your permission, you can either display a notice to this effect at the site of original publication or send an e-mail from an address associated with the original publication to permissions-enwikimedia.org or a postal letter to the Wikimedia Foundation. These messages must explicitly permit use under CC BY-SA and the GFDL. See Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials.
Note that articles on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view and must be verifiable in published third-party sources; consider whether, copyright issues aside, your text is appropriate for inclusion in Wikipedia.
Otherwise, you may rewrite this page without copyright-infringing material. Your rewrite should be placed on this page, where it will be available for an administrator or clerk to review it at the end of the listing period. Follow this link to create the temporary subpage. Please mention the rewrite upon completion on this article's discussion page.
Simply modifying copyrighted text is not sufficient to avoid copyright infringement—if the original copyright violation cannot be cleanly removed or the article reverted to a prior version, it is best to write the article from scratch. (See Wikipedia:Close paraphrasing.)
For license compliance, any content used from the original article must be properly attributed; if you use content from the original, please leave a note at the top of your rewrite saying as much. You may duplicate non-infringing text that you had contributed yourself.
It is always a good idea, if rewriting, to identify the point where the copyrighted content was imported to Wikipedia and to check to make sure that the contributor did not add content imported from other sources. When closing investigations, clerks and administrators may find other copyright problems than the one identified. If this material is in the proposed rewrite and cannot be easily removed, the rewrite may not be usable.
Place {{copyvio/bottom}} at the end of the portion you want to blank. If nominating the entire page, please place this template at the top of the page, set the "fullpage" parameter to "yes", and place {{copyvio/bottom}} at the very end of the article.
Ezra Davids[1] is the head of the corporate and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) department at Bowman Gilfillan, specialising in mergers and acquisitions, capital markets and securities law.
Since 1996 Who's Who Legal has identified the foremost legal practitioners in 32 areas of business law. This year, in the International Who’s Who of Mergers & Acquisitions Lawyers 2013 category, Who's Who Legal commented: “Ezra Davids is regarded as one of the top 10 Mergers & Acquisitions lawyers globally. Ezra is the only lawyer from Africa on this list and according to Who’s Who respondents praise his sophisticated understanding of complex issues.”
Some of the most recent transactions in which Ezra acted as lead partner include acting as South African counsel to Bharti in its then proposed merger with MTN ($24 billion); advising Verizon Communications in its disposal of its subsidiary, Verizon Business (SA); acting as South African Counsel to M1 and Investcom in the latter’s acquisition by MTN (US$5.5 billion); advising Barrick Gold Corporation in its disposal of Barrick Gold SA (US$1.55 billion) and for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup in the disposal by Polyus (Norilisk) of its entire shareholding in Gold Fields Limited (US$2.02 billion); for SABMiller in the US$1 billion BEE transaction for its South African subsidiary; for Old Mutual Plc in the aborted negotiations related to the acquisition by HSBC control of Nedbank Limited; for Tokyo Stock Exchange listed Kansai Paint Co. Ltd. in its successful hostile bid for JSE listed Freeworld Coatings Limited (R3.3 billion); and as South African counsel for PPR in the disposal of its furniture and household goods business, Conforama, to JSE-listed Steinhoff International Holdings Limited (R12 billion).
Ezra is the chairman of the Faculty Advisory Board of the Law School of the University of Cape Town.
He is also a member of the board of trustees of the Legal Resources Trust, a director of Freedom Under Law and a patron of the Student Sponsorship Programme that enables academically talented, low income students to excel in South Africa’s best high schools.
He is also the former chairman of the M&A subcommittee of the business organisations committee
of the International Bar Association and is the vice-chair, Africa Regional Forum of the International Bar Association.
John Brand
Where individual awards are concerned, Bowman Gilfillan attorney John Brand and UK-based dispute resolution practitioner Felicity Steadman were recognised for their mediation training at the biennial Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution (CEDR) Awards for excellence. The awards, announced at a ceremony in London in November last year, were attended by representatives from the alternative dispute resolution (ADR) and legal communities.
The Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution (CEDR) is an independent, non-profit organisation with a mission to cut the cost of conflict and create choice and capability in dispute prevention and resolution. It sets the standard for dispute resolution and conflict management with leading mediation, consultancy and training services.
In the ADR Trainer category of the awards, John Brand and Felicity Steadman were recognised for their work with the African Centre for Dispute Settlement and Conflict Dynamics in the training of over 160 accredited commercial mediators in South Africa.
John Brand, an attorney of the High Court of South Africa, is a member of the advisory board of the African Centre for Dispute Settlement and is a member of the executive committee of the Dispute Settlement Accreditation Council. He also serves as a member on the International Mediation Institute's (IMI) Independent Standards Commission.
He co-designed the conciliation and arbitration induction training for the South African Commission for Conciliation Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) and has trained many of South Africa’s employment and commercial mediators and arbitrators over the past 15 years. Brand was a member of the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) team of international experts appointed to design mediation training for developing countries.
Felicity Steadman is a full time dispute resolution practitioner and trainer from South Africa. She is based in the UK and works as a mediator trainer and as a mediator. Steadman is a founding member of Oxford Mediation and has worked extensively with the ILO, designing training materials and training conciliators and mediators in developing countries.
Brand and Steadman have worked together since the late 1980's, and co-wrote conciliator and mediator training materials for the ILO and have trained conciliators and mediators in many developing countries.
By 2007, Brand and Steadman recognised that while mediation was a well established dispute resolution process in the labour field in South Africa it had yet to be established in the commercial sphere, a situation increasingly at odds with the trend elsewhere in the world. They also recognised that if mediation was to be embraced by parties to commercial disputes, it was crucial that mediators were well trained and accredited.
In 2007 they approached CEDR to involve it in the training of commercial mediators in South Africa. By 2010 Brand and Steadman had developed an indigenous commercial mediator skills training course which was endorsed by CEDR, and a competency framework to use in coaching mediators. Together with their colleague Chris Todd, Brand and Steadman recently published a book on commercial mediation in South Africa.
Lawyers working in the Johannesburg and Cape Town offices of Bowman Gilfillan Inc delivered R13.7 million in pro bono work for worthy causes during the financial year to end February 2013.
Lawyers in the group clocked just over 7 890 hours of pro bono work, with the average number of hours for each lawyer being 24.4. According to Fatima Laher, Pro Bono Manager at Bowman Gilfillan: “This is a wonderful achievement on the part of our lawyers and support staff.
“We work towards building strong stakeholder relationships with the non-profit sector in order to source deserving pro bono work. We have also formed partnerships with different organisations.”
“Our firm is fully committed to pro bono work, and our policy in this regard encourages every lawyer in our firm to do pro bono work. My role is to coordinate Bowman Gilfillan’s pro bono work and to assist with identifying deserving causes to benefit from our pro bono programme.”
Pro bono clinics are an important way for Bowman Gilfillan to expose the maximum number of lawyers to pro bono work and to ensure that all lawyers can access pro bono work that appeals to their area of interest in justice and human rights.
At the clinics clients are seen and advised of their rights. Where possible, steps are taken to resolve problems immediately. With more complex matters, files are opened for the client at the firm and the client is assisted on a pro bono basis. In terms of this programme, Bowman Gilfillan offers pro bono services to refugees by servicing the Refugee Clinic which is coordinated and hosted by ProBono.Org, the firm’s partner in the delivery of services.
Bowman Gilfillan offers pro bono services to individuals with their housing problems by servicing the Housing Clinic which is also coordinated and hosted by ProBono.Org.[2] In addition, lawyers offer their pro bono services to labour law clients through another clinic held at the Labour Court in Braamfontein.
