DLA Piper has named Bob Martens as Belgium managing partner with Yves Tavernier stepping down after two years in the role.
Tavernier joined the firm from Coudert Brothers’s Brussels office in 2005, bringing a team of seven partners and over 20 fee earners with him (www.thelawyer.com, 23 September 2005). In the same year DLA Piper opened in Beijing with a team plundered from Coudert and headed by Jingzhou Tao (www.thelawyer.com, 9 December 2005). Tao left the firm earlier this year to join Jones Day.
While he is stepping down from the managerial role Tavernier, who has spent the past two years integrating the Coudert and DLA Piper teams, will remain at DLA Piper, focusing on banking commercial and corporate litigation.
Martens, currently head of the litigation and regulatory practice in Belgium, will take over as managing partner at the beginning of January.
He said he is looking forward to building advancing what the firm has achieved on a local and international level.
Thanking Tavernier for his commitment over the past two years Andrew Darwin, DLA Piper’s Europe managing director, added: “Under his leadership we successfully integrated his former Coudert colleagues into DLA Piper which gave us a strong platform from which we could expand.”
In Belgium the firm has around 100 lawyers divided across offices in Brussels and Antwerp.
