When Emil Davtyan formed his wage and hour class action law firm in 2015, he had to be collaborative.
At the time, what was then known as Davtyan Law made a name for itself in identifying its potential class actions, doing the groundwork and research to prepare the cases – and then partnering with an outside firm to actually litigate that case.
In 2023, Davtyan decided it was time to evolve – thus setting his firm on the path to becoming D.Law and growing from just eight attorneys to 50 within four years.
“Litigation has been in the last three years pretty much the focus of the next stage growth for the firm,” Davtyan said. “Everything is done to litigate cases in house. The firm has focused essentially all growth-related steps to, ‘How do we grow our ability to handle more cases in-house?’”
Litigation has been the name of the game for another firm – San Francisco-based Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani – as it has significantly ramped up its Los Angeles-area operation. In four years, the Am Law 100 firm has jumped from 85 attorneys working out of its downtown operation to 211 – a staggering growth of 126 attorneys.
The firm – which boasts the signature of being the only law firm with offices in all 50 states in the U.S. – is the sixth largest firm in the country and now counts about 10% of its entire attorney headcount as working out of L.A. in some capacity.
As Brandon Saxon – a San Diego-based member of GRSM’s national management council who broadly plots the firm’s expansion in L.A. and Irvine – sees it, the firm’s widespread presence and skillset feeds its own growth.
“Part of the attractiveness of us to attorneys – seasoned attorneys and new attorneys – is those opportunities,” he said. “If you look at your mid-level (attorneys) that maybe have 10 or 15 years under their belt and are starting to grow that book of business, but for whatever reason, are having limitations or hitting a ceiling, you bring that same platform and that book of business to a firm like GRSM, and we see it again and again where that book just continues to grow and just continues to open up.”
Climbing ladders
Davtyan’s opportunity to grow came in 2023, when a longtime partner who’d litigated his casework wanted to sell his firm, then known as the Law Offices of Kevin T. Barnes.
With that deal, D.Law became eight attorneys who already had experience working with Davtyan and his team of paralegals, case managers and researchers. Later that year, D.Law also added the team at David Yeremian & Associates.
This became the starting point for what has been 525% growth over a four-year period. Since the two mergers, hiring has been an organic effort, Davtyan said, driven largely by the sort of marketing that brings clients to them. In doing so, D.Law has added a growing single-plaintiff employment law practice to the operation.
“I would like us to think that we’re one of the better firms in terms of our recruiting efforts,” he said. “You have ads that more organically bring prospects to your firm. I’d like to think that the same approach has worked for talent recruitment.”
In an increasingly competitive market driven by lateral movement across firms, Davtyan said one strategy the firm uses to attract young attorneys who want to stay is with a robust summer associates program he started years ago. And to make it more personal and effective, he hired Brandon Ruiz to develop and run the program, instead of tasking a full-time litigator to make time to do so.
“We get some of the best talent from the best law schools in or around L.A. and California, and we create our own pipeline of labor and employment attorneys,” Davtyan said. “He has also created a number of different programs to teach labor and employment law to our associates who might not have come through our summer associates program, but are first-, second- or third-year attorneys who still need many aspects of labor and employment law to learn.”
D.Law is also in the process of creating a similar training program for paralegals and other professionals who aren’t attorneys – the bulk of the staff composing their 200-plus person operation.
“We want to do this twice a year to allow us to tap into legal support staff on as needed basis twice a year, as opposed to the summer associates program,” Davtyan added.
GRSM’s downtown office has taken a similar approach to talent attraction and retention, according to office co-managing partner Peter Schwartz. The practice had fallen off around when the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, he noted.
“We have a team of people who run the law clerk program, and they are working to develop people even before they graduate from law school, get them immersed in the firm and train them the way we want to train them,” Schwartz said. “Hopefully they stay and they go on and they become partners and they become mainstays of the firm. Bringing people in at that level is a is a very good way to maintain a steady flow of new people coming into their ranks.”
An environment with that personal touch is a story that Schwartz can relate to. He celebrated his 25th anniversary with the firm’s downtown office last week and it has been the only firm he’s worked for; when he joined in 2001, the firm had just three offices and 125 attorneys, of whom 16 were in Los Angeles.
“I took over managing in 2003, and then we just started adding to the scope of what we did, to the point where we now do a ton of employment-related litigation, commercial litigation, professional liability, products liability – you name it. Other than criminal and divorce law, we do most everything in civil litigation.”
For Candice Nam, the downtown office’s other co-managing partner, it’s the second firm of her career – she began work with a solo practitioner who soon wished to downsize and blessed her with a letter of recommendation to make a lateral move.
In that search, she said GRSM came by recommendation of her law school’s career service center.
“The thing that pulled me to Gordon Rees was the diversity. There was always a large number of diverse partners and leadership,” she said. “I think at that time we were probably in about maybe 20 or so states, and it was just before or just around the time that we were thinking about launching the 50-state platform.”
Physical expansion
While GRSM is in all 50 states, D.Law remains a California-only operation – for now.
“One thing that the firm has actively started exploring is to… expand our ability to handle labor and employment, wage and class action cases outside of California,” Davtyan said, noting that the firm’s competitors are doing the same. “We will stay true to California in terms of being a big firm doing this line of work in California, but in addition, in the next six months, it is our intention to grow more of our capabilities outside of California because there’s just a lot of market out there that needs labor and employment help.”
Davtyan said he’s looking at Washington state, New York, Illinois, Colorado and Oregon for this next stage of growth. And he’ll go back to the playbook on how to do it.
“One of the possibilities that we acquire other firms who are already established doing this line of work, and help them grow,” Davtyan said, “or we hire ourselves and get them licensed in some of these states – or hire them if they’re licensed already – and doing it from scratch.”
The local growth has prompted D.Law to make its second headquarters move in four years. After being based in Glendale for most its existence, the firm completed a move to Pasadena this year – and retained its signature contemporary buildout that is designed to keep employees happy at the office, with amenities and activities to foster a collegial environment.
“One of the things that we distinguish ourselves from other firms is really an office-first type approach. One of the things we’ve noticed very heavily in our recruiting efforts is that there’s also a lot of fatigue for lawyers and legal staff that have been away from the office, and that they prefer to be back in the office because just the work environment is not the same to be remote. We’ve been one of the few firms who have cherished this in-office type environment.”
What’s more, D.Law became among the few law firms to actually own its property.
“The Pasadena space gave us clean canvas to do many things that we thought we wanted to do from scratch. Obviously, the Glendale location had a lot of limitations that we wanted to adapt to, but it was not our space,” Davtyan said. “Although I would say that we generally have a history of making every space our own, with this one, we did it intentionally from scratch.”
GRSM also recently completed an office move, trading in two floors downtown for a larger single floor in Bunker Hill which consolidates the team and allows for more flexibility with hoteling and meeting spaces.
Conversely to an office-first approach, Schwartz said GRSM’s move accounts for the wider spread of its attorneys in Southern California and for the fact that they’re often out with clients.
“It’s kind of right-sizing our space to the post-COVID realities of office usage,” he said.
And rather than look to premium spaces in Century City, the firm was eager to stay downtown, in spite of its well-documented troubles with homelessness, crime and stalled development.
“I know that some firms have left downtown, but for us as primarily a litigation office, it makes sense to be downtown where there’s both a federal and state courthouse,” Schwartz said.
Nam added that downtown presents itself both as a relatively centralized home to where her colleagues live and as an area poised to become more vibrant as it adjusts to become a residential center with the city’s revitalization efforts.
“You see the effort from the businesses, you see the effort from the tenants, and there’s just a lot more activity now, which, in this part of the decade, I think is really great to see,” she added. “In addition to being a good market and being near the courthouses, it actually turns out to be a convenient place for many of our people to come to.”
