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By Zusha Elinson
The Recorder
01-18-2007

It's 5 a.m. on a national holiday and Colleen Davies has just gotten on a conference call with the rest of Reed Smith's senior management team.

The Monday morning discussions are quickly becoming a ritual for the star litigator, who was recently chosen to head the firm's 625-lawyer litigation department, giving her a spot on the seven-member committee that runs the firm.

It's the first time Davies, a partner in Reed Smith's Oakland, Calif., office, has served in a high-level management role. It's also the first time the 1,300-lawyer firm has brought a woman onto the senior management team.

"We're not grandstanding -- it's an attempt to make sure that we have the right team running the firm," said Gregory Jordan, managing partner and chairman of the senior management team, who made the appointment. "From a leadership standpoint, we try more than ever before to promote women and minority partners to leadership positions -- I think Reed Smith, along with some other firms, has some catching up to do."

The firm was recognized for increasing the ranks of its female partnership by 50 percent from 2002 to 2005 -- to about 18 percent of its partners -- in a book published by Harvard Law School graduates, "Presumed Equal: What America's Top Women Lawyers Really Think About Their Firms." However, the same study also ranked the best large law firms for women and Reed Smith came in at 73 among 105 firms surveyed.

Davies started as an associate at Oakland's Crosby, Heafey, Roach & May in 1983, joining Reed Smith when the firms merged in 2003. According to her colleagues, Davies' rise to prominence as a product liability litigator in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries has been with an eye not just to winning courtroom battles, but to providing long-term strategies to avoid those battles.

"It's the evolution of my own practice that the clients that are the most happy are the ones where we're looking at the underlying matter that caused the litigation," Davies said. "You really have to be able to counsel them so that they're better prepared to prevent the litigation down the road."

Davies is taking that same tack as head of Reed Smith's litigation department. She has named five new deputies, adding two new positions -- a chief operating officer as well as someone in charge of e-discovery issues -- in an effort to make the department as client-friendly as possible, she said.

"It's a business model and it's a business approach," she said.

Charles Hewetson, a London-based partner from the ranks of recently merged Richards Butler, will be the department deputy; Philadelphia partner Karl Fritton will head up the specialty litigation group; Oakland partner Jack Nelson will head up commercial litigation; Los Angeles partner Janet Kwuon will fill the e-discovery position and Richard Jones, former Alschuler Grossman COO, will serve as COO of the department.

Although she professes to have little management experience, the business sense is in the family. Her husband, Joseph Ronan Jr., is a lawyer and senior vice president at power company Calpine. The couple lives in Pleasanton, Calif., with their two children: Katie, 13, and Patrick, 9.

And they may be two of the reasons why Davies agreed to the 5 a.m. conference call even after the other senior management team members -- many located on the East Coast -- insisted it be moved back three hours to accommodate her earlier time zone.

"It's nice doing the call that early," she said. "Everyone's asleep then."