Advising international clients has become a major business for several North Carolina law firms as the state has become a favored magnet for global companies.
But Parker Poe is the Tar Heel State firm with the claim of establishing the first dedicated international practice group. Michael Almond is credited with getting the business going in Charlotte in 1984, and over the next 15 years helped expand the firm that now has about 275 lawyers and six offices in the Carolinas, plus one each in Atlanta and Washington, D.C.
Parker Poe celebrated the 40th anniversary of its international group with a reception last week at the Sullenberger Aviation Museum. The venue adjacent to Charlotte Douglas International Airport holds the “Miracle on the Hudson” passenger jet that landed safely in New York’s Hudson River in 2009.
Almond “was ahead of his time” in seeing the opportunity to assist European manufacturers open sales and service operations in the Charlotte region, says Al Guarnieri, a veteran Parker Poe attorney who leads the global manufacturing and distribution practice. Almond later led the Charlotte Regional Partnership before returning to Parker Poe. He is now retired, but attended the museum event.
Guarnieri noted that mostly family-owned textile and furniture businesses led the first wave of foreign investment in the Carolinas, followed by larger European and Asian auto parts manufacturers. The Charlotte and Greenville, South Carolina, markets have become leading beneficiaries of foreign direct investment, triggered by BMW’s auto plant that opened in Upstate South Carolina in 1994.
Parker Poe’s work includes site selection, merger and acquisitions and economic development. Key players in the firm’s growth have included Sam Moses, a partner in Columbia and Elizabeth Gibbes, a partner in Charleston.
Moses was a veteran official at the S.C. Department of Commerce before joining Parker Poe. Gibbes is the honorary consul of Germany for South Carolina and Georgia.
Earlier this fall, Moses was part of a trip arranged by the firm’s Business Expansion and Location Solutions Team, which met with dozens of businesses in Germany, Italy and Switzerland that have shown interest in U.S. expansion. Europe’s manufacturing economy is facing major challenges, prompting many middle-market companies to look to the U.S. for growth, Moses says.
That kind of work has helped differentiate Parker Poe and led to “deep friendships that span the globe,” Managing Partner Tom Griffin said at the museum event.
The firm name is derived from World War II veterans Francis Parker, a former N.C. Supreme Court justice, and Bill Poe, a former chair of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board. The firm had a practice of about 65 lawyers by 1990 when it merged with the 30-lawyer Raleigh firm of Adams, McCullough & Beard, which former N.C. Gov. Terry Sanford had helped form in 1965.
