 My name is Mark Shklav, and I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea program. Today we are going to travel across all the seas in many countries. Our program is titled Becoming Dentons, and my guest is Paul Alston. Paul has been practicing law in Hawaii for over 40 years and is the co-founder and president of Alston Hunt, Floyd and Ng, which was one of the largest local Hawaii law firms with offices in Honolulu and Hilo. Alston Hunt, Floyd and Ng has recently combined with Dentons, the largest law firm in the world. Dentons presently has more than 9,000 lawyers in more than 167 locations in 73 countries on six continents, and that is a lot. And Paul, thank you very much for being here. My pleasure. First of all, I want to talk about Dentons for sure. I mean, it's just amazing when I read out those figures. It is. But who's Paul Alston? Where are you from? How did you get to Hawaii? How did you form Alston Hunt and Floyd and Ng? What's a little bit of background on you? Sure. I grew up in Southern California surfing every weekend. When I was young and just beginning high school, I committed with three friends to move to Hawaii and ride big waves, and then it was two friends and then it was one friend and then it was nobody. I had worked all through high school to achieve the dream of coming to Hawaii. Because of the big waves? Because of the big waves. And so I graduated on Friday, and on the following Tuesday I was here with my surf board and a skateboard. My mother said, if you're going to go for too long, you've got to go to college. So I walked up to UH and enrolled, and the rest is history. I've been here ever since, except for five years on the mainland for law school. And where did you go to law school? USC. USC. You came back. You still wanted to surf. Right. I still want, well, no. In the meantime, I married a woman from Hilo, and then it became a choice of downtown LA or downtown Honolulu, or Honolulu in general. And I had clerked for a federal judge downtown and realized that living and working in Los Angeles was really not what I aspired to and not good for our then two-year-old daughter. So you clerked while at law school? Just after law school, a year after law school. In Los Angeles. In Los Angeles. Right. And then while I had been in law school, I clerked here for a summer with Dan Case's law firm, which was then one of the biggest firms in town. And the three other law clerks and I wrote a manifesto to Dan saying, we love the firm, we love you, but the firm doesn't do enough for the poor in the middle class. So if you'll let us do some pro bono work, we'll be happy to accept the offers that you've extended and work with you. To return. To return after law school. And he said if we were impetuous punks, which we were. And so Bob LeClaire and I literally walked down the street to the legal aid office and got jobs at legal aid. And I ended up at the 442 barracks in Y&I for two and a half years. And it was great fun because there were no adults to supervise us and nobody to say no to whatever sort of idea we had. Well, why did you want to do this? I mean, look, everybody thinks that lawyers are out there to make money and I guess we are to a certain extent. But why did you feel this need? Where did that come from? You know, it was part of the culture in law school that lawyers have the ability to make things right for people who are being hurt. And whether it's hurt by the government or hurt by some predatory creditor or something like that, you could actually do good things. And so we went out to Y&I. There were four lawyers for a population of 25,000 people. And our brief was to do whatever the people in the community needed. To help them in legal aid? To help them in legal aid. And so we did criminal cases. We did family cases. We did federal court cases. The first lawsuit I ever filed was a class action against the Department of Education. The first lawsuit? The first lawsuit. Oh, my God. And this was 44 years ago, which is, you know, gives me a great sense of deja vu all over again with respect to the continuing problems. With education? With education. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah, it was. It's like where we are. You're right. We're kind of going through the same thing again. You know, we were, by firm with Eric Seitz, we've served as lead counsel in the Felix case. And there will be more cases like Felix because the day Judge Ezra lifted the consent decree, the DOE began backsliding. And now it's worse than it ever is. And how are we going to take care of our kids? Exactly. Is the big issue, right? Exactly. So you worked at Legal Aid. And I assume you're still surfing. Right. And then what happened? So after five years, I just got burned out. I was supervising 20 lawyers at the time. And it was just seven days a week and 15 hours a day, something like that. It was a great job, but it was just wearing me out. I started a small firm with two other people. And who were they? Jim Paul and Dave Johnson. OK. And that was in the fall of 1977. Were those buddies of yours? Yeah, they were buddies. We were all, you know, all the same age, you know, and they had left the Carl Smith firm and started a small firm. And I joined and we quickly reformed that into Paul Johnson and Alston. And we grew that firm from three lawyers to 18 lawyers. And they thought that was too big. They thought there were just too many people and too much turmoil in terms of hiring and people coming and going. And so in 1991, we split nine lawyers and nine lawyers. And the other people who came with me thought we were just beginning. The fund was just beginning. We could grow something bigger. Was that your feeling? Absolutely. And so what did, and was that the firm now, Alston Hunt-Fleudening, was that the name of the firm at that time? Right. And there were two women partners, two male partners. And we had, you know, just the vision that we could grow a firm that could, you know, do more than we could as a small firm. Well, why do you say that? I mean, what does size have to do with it? I mean, it almost sounds like it's a political statement here. Yeah. But, you know, if you get bigger, you know, you tend to attract bigger cases. You tend to attract things that are more difficult and challenging and professionally rewarding. I mean, just intellectually rewarding. And if you build a firm around friendship and you build a firm where, you know, you have good people who are good friends, then it just becomes more fun to practice law. And that's what we thought we were achieving. Alston Hunt, Floyd and Egan, we're all friends. Right. You're all still together? You're all... Well, Shelby retired. Shelby Floyd retired. She abandoned her law license to go into the marijuana business. And we wished... The legal... The legal medical marijuana business. Let's get that clear. And we wished her well. She ended up getting up, being the licensee for one of the Big Island dispensaries. Okay. But the other three of us, Bill Hunt and Louise Ng and me, are still working together. Okay. And are you... As Alston Hunt, Floyd and Ng, did you continue to do the outrageous pro bono work for people who said you wanted to do when you were just a young law student? We did. We did. As I mentioned, we were co-lead counsel in the Felix case. We brought class actions for homeless kids who were not attending school because the DOE simply wasn't providing for them. We brought the lawsuit that resulted in the refurbishment of Cuyo Park Terrace. We brought a lawsuit challenging the failure to provide food stamps in a timely manner. We brought the case that was recently settled for foster children, which produced... It's going to produce about $100 million in additional payments for foster parents over the next 10 years. And all of this is through your private firm. All through the private firm. And it's on a pro bono basis. Right. And what happens is we take these cases on with the hope that we will get paid something at the end. It's never what we could make working for commercial clients. No guarantee. But it helps pay the rent. And most importantly, it helps us give young lawyers the opportunity to jump into court, take responsibility for an important matter, and learn how to be a first-chair lawyer. And so we've always used it as a way to serve the community and serve the young lawyers who are trying to build careers. Okay. So, Alston Hunt Floyd Ng. Right. Hey, did pretty good here in Hawaii. We're growing. Growing. You had quite a few attorneys, right? Yeah. We ended up with, at the high point, about 55 lawyers, which made us the fourth-largest firm in Hawaii. Who's Denton's? You know, how did they come into the picture? Yeah, well, I had a friend with whom I'd worked on cases for about 10 years on various cases in Hawaii. And one day we were down at the Hale Kalani watching the hula dancers in the sunset. And he leaned over and said, would you be interested? And I said, should I be? I don't know, you know? Why? You know, we seem to be doing pretty well on our own. Why would we think about, you know, joining what was then about a 7,000 lawyer firm. How long ago was this? This was two years ago. Two years ago. Yeah, they were about 7,500 then. And it's a buddy from Hawaii that you're talking about? Actually, it was a buddy from Dallas, Texas. Oh, okay. And so he was out here working on a case. And then what followed that in short order was a meeting with the chairman, the global chairman and the global CEO. And we just had a lot of things in common in terms of how do you approach the practice of law? Okay, before we get there, what is Denton's? I mean, Denton's is... Define it, please. Denton's is a verrain, which is a business organization... That's a legal term. That's a business organization under Swiss law. Oh, okay. And in simple terms, it's a partnership of partnerships so that there is a... Denton's U.S., there's the dot-chang, the Chinese entity. And we're all under one umbrella around the world practicing together in a partnership. Okay. And when did Denton start? About ten years ago. And it was the merger of three firms in different places around the world. And from that seed grew the firm that exists today. And the three firms around the world, one of them was Denton's? Well, one of them was... had the name Denton's in it. It was Denton while SAP, which is out of the U.K. And there was a man named John Denton in the 1750s. And because the name was so... If you try to do what many lawyers do and include everybody's name in the name, it doesn't work, so they shortened it to Denton's. So Denton's is like a possessive in a way. Is that... No. There was a Denton. There was a Denton. About 300 years ago. About 300. He was a lawyer. Is that right? Yes, right. And he was a British firm. And so all these firms, they'd been around for a while, but the Denton's itself just formed about ten years ago. Right. There was a firm in the U.S. called Sonnenschein, which became, through the first tier merger, SNR Denton. And then there was a firm out of Canada, a firm on the European continent, and the firms just started coming together. And if you were to look on our website, you would see the legacy firms from across the country and across the world. And it sounds like something happened. And we're going to take a break, but it sounds like all at once some sort of synchronistic feeling happened. And I want you to answer that after we take a break. Okay. All right. We'll be right back. I'm Jay Feidell, Think Tech. Think Tech loves energy. I'm the host of Mina, Marco, and Me, which is Mina Morita, the former chair of the PUC, former legislator, and Energy Dynamics, a consulting organization in energy. Marco Mangostorf is the CEO of Provision Solar in Hilo. Every two weeks, we talk about energy, everything about energy. Come around and watch us. We're on at noon on Mondays, every two weeks on Think Tech. Aloha. Hi, I'm Bill Sharp, host of Asian Review here on Think Tech, Hawaii. Join me every Monday afternoon from 5 to 5.30, Hawaii Standard Time for an insightful discussion of Contemporary Asian Affairs. There's so much to discuss, and the guests that we have are very, very well informed. Just think we have the upcoming negotiation between President Trump and Kim Jong-un. The possibility of Xi Jinping, the leader of China, remaining in power forever. We'll see you then. Welcome back. I am Mark Shklav, host of Think Tech, Hawaii's Law Across the Sea, and I'm here with Paul Alston. Becoming Dentons, and we're talking about how Dentons became. You mentioned that about 10 years ago, it seemed like several firms from different places combined had the same idea. Right. Well, they came together, and then the leadership of the firm realized that clients didn't have needs that were just limited to one city, one state, one country. They had needs around the world. Times are changing. Times are changing. And if you wanted to best serve the clients, you needed to be able to assure them that the firm could provide high quality representation, not just in London, not just in New York, but in all the places around the world where they might find themselves doing business. And what we found when we began talking with Dentons was that out of the firm's top 100 clients, over 60 had a presence in Hawaii already, and we found that we represent independently of Dentons, we represented over 20 of those clients. We see. And so they became obvious pretty quickly that there was going to be some synergy with respect to being able to provide services in Hawaii. What we also found was that Hawaii clients had needs outside of Hawaii. And so we determined also very quickly that if a client called, instead of having to go hunt for a lawyer in New York or San Francisco or Dubai or Italy, as some clients have asked us to do, we would have people. And we'd have people within the one firm. Within the one firm working on the same platform, meeting the same standards, committed to the same quality of service that we were committed to already. And so that was very exciting to be able to come together. So you're watching the hula at the Hale Kalani and your friend leans over and he had something on his mind. He said, hey, how about this? And then you got, what was the process? What was the process of finding out that you were compatible that you could work together with Dentons, which had, you know, for the past 10 years been growing apparently and with thousands of lawyers all over the world. Well, you know, we knew many of the legacy firms. So we knew them and the quality of work they were doing. Those are firms that have gone into Dentons. Right. And so we knew them. And one of our partners actually worked at one of the legacy firms in New York. And so she knew the people and she knew the quality of the work they did. And it then took close to two years to try to bring it all together. To talk about it. And did they explain to, I mean, did they explain to you, I mean, how did, how do you, is it just cocktails at Hale Kalani that brings the firms together? That was just, you know, the initial contact. And then as I said, we met, I met with the global chairman, the global CEO in San Francisco. And then they sent four people out from the U.S., the leadership group to see if we were real. You know, if we really were who we said we were. And that series of meetings went well. And then last year, last summer, we went to the global partnership meeting in Toronto where there were 2,400 people, literally from around the world. That series of meetings went well and it just sort of evolved. We just kept exploring the business case for coming together. To me, it kind of makes sense for Hawaii to be in something like that because we do have cross-cultural meetings and people from all over the world coming through here for various reasons and companies that are international. I didn't see that. Is that kind of the same feeling that you had? Very much so. I knew I never wanted the firm to be the distant western outpost of a U.S. firm. That makes no sense. But Dentons is committed to the Pacific Rim. There are 4,500 lawyers in China alone. We have lawyers in Korea, in Singapore, in Australia. It's opened in Indonesia and Malaysia. In terms of a firm that recognized the future lying in the Pacific, this was a tremendous opportunity. I wanted to mention China again. I want to take a look at the logo that you have for Dentons. It's unusual. It has Dentons and then it has some Chinese characters. What's the story of that? When the non-China firm was thinking about expanding into China, the firm had to not only make an agreement with the Chinese firm, but also with the government, because it was the first time that a Chinese firm was becoming part of a bigger international enterprise. One of the thoughts expressed by the Chinese government was that if this was going to happen, then the Chinese characters needed to be part of the name of the firm. As you can see, they became the first part of the name of the firm. It means Da Cheng, which was the legacy name of the Chinese firm. That's to identify and keep the identity of the Chinese partner that are associated within the firm. The Chinese partners are full partners in the firm, just as we are. Tell me what that means, because it says you combined with them. What does that mean? It wasn't a traditional merger, because we were a corporation and Dentons is a partnership. Under the tax law, business law, you can't just merge a corporation into a partnership, so we combined. That's interesting. Are you a partner of Dentons? For the people who were partners in Alston Hunter, now partners in Dentons. What did you tell your clients? What are the pros and cons for clients? I like you, Paul, but I'm not sure about the guy in San Francisco. I have another lawyer there. One of the things that was most attractive to me is that unlike some big firms, they don't come with a manual and say this is how you are to act, this is how you are to treat clients, this is how you are to do business day by day. What they came and said was we know you know how to treat clients well, we know you know how to provide great service to clients in the community and from beyond the community. We want to continue that. We don't want to change what you are doing. We want to do it better together. That was really attractive. They didn't impose something on you? No, they didn't impose anything. They said let's go make, let's build to collaboratively on what we have both been doing. That's what you told your clients? That's what we told our clients. What was the reaction? Uniformly positive. How about the pro bono stuff? Paul Alston is a pro bono guy. He's a good guy. Does these cases, what happened there? It's very interesting because in the first conversation they said that Dentons is a firm that's committed to pro bono work as well. In 2017, Dentons contributed $35 million worth of pro bono work. Just last month they committed $2 million in pro bono work to clean energy initiatives. They said we love what you're doing. We want you to keep doing it. We want to support it. We want you to teach us how you've been doing it and build on that success. That caught your attention. The law school kid thought he should do pro bono kind of identified with that. We're still doing it. That's very exciting. You can see on the brochures we talk about the firm being in and of the community. It's not just being in the community in a way that's not contributing to the community but being of the community because our lawyers are out doing work in nonprofits in various ways that support the well-being of the community. That's important. It was important to them. Now that we're together it's important to all of this. So just being big isn't the goal here? No. What did the local community the local law firm community they saw this and what was the reaction? The only reaction that I can see is that one lawyer as you may know complained to the Supreme Court that we shouldn't be able to practice law anymore because we are not a firm. We are a big firm and he said that that violated the court's rules. We looked very hard at that issue before we did the combination. We found that there were four or five firms local firms that have done what we have now done but on a smaller scale most notably the Carl Smith firm which 30 some years ago combined the California law firm and no one complained about them doing what we've done and so we decided this was in fact permissible and we've gone forward and his challenges are still pending but we are hopeful and confident that they're not going to go anywhere. What have you learned from all of this taking your career from beginning to end to now? What have you learned from all of this and going forward with Dentons? What are your hopes? You know it's for me personally I'm a 71 and now I don't expect to be practicing for all that much longer. I still love what I do and I don't have any intention of stopping but for the younger people in the firm this is a tremendous opportunity. We had the chairman of the firm come out last week and he sat with everybody in the firm and asked about them and asked what they were interested in and to me the most impressive thing was to everybody he said after hearing what they want to do with their careers he said you know you should be in touch with so and so in Hong Kong or so and so in Shanghai or somebody in New York within the Dentons firm you should talk to our partner in this city or that city because they're doing what you you're doing and together you can both do it better and that to me is the most exciting thing for the firm and for the young lawyers in the firm. It's not a matter of them being a little robot in the middle of the ocean we now have a much bigger platform for people to launch careers. You have a network and a group of friendly colleagues and it sounds like some of the same feelings about the practice of law. Very much so. Well Paul I appreciate you coming in today and talking to us about Dentons. It would be very interesting to see how it moves forward and it's growing still and there's more lawyers coming all the time to it. It's an interesting aspect of the law. I'd like to view it and see how it moves forward and I appreciate you coming to talk to me. Thank you sir. Anytime. Thank you. Aloha everybody.