From Paris to
Africa
The French capital is home base for the
small club of lawyers who do deals in the most
complicated emerging market of all.
By Claire Zillman
Crushed frogs. That’s what a witch doctor in Zaire slathered on Jean- Claude Petilon’s legs a few hours
before he played his first game with a local
basketball team. “The frog lotion would make
us jump higher,” Petilon recalls.
Today, a photograph of the team hangs on
the wall of Petilon’s Paris office, which is off
a courtyard near the Opéra Garnier. Petilon,
a French national, is the only white man in
the picture. When it was taken, in 1974, he
was a young lawyer who had been dispatched
to Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire—now the
Democratic Republic of Congo—to open
an office for what was then Duncan Allen &
Mitchell. The U.S. firm wanted to set up an
all-purpose office to represent American clients investing in Zaire. Playing basketball was
a way to build ties to the community and to
understand the culture. “It was essential to be
seen as not being there to just make money,”
Petilon says. “For a foreign lawyer to compete
with local firms, you had to be involved in
local life.”
Africa has been at the center of Petilon’s
practice ever since, even after he returned
to France in 1979. Now a partner at Fasken
Martineau DuMoulin, Petilon is one of a small
community of mostly Paris-based lawyers who
have built Africa-focused practices over the
past three decades, after the continent first
began attracting foreign investment in the
1970s and 1980s. The Africa bar includes law-
yers from U.K. firms Clifford Chance, Herbert
Smith, Linklaters, Denton Wilde Sapte, and
Allen & Overy; U.S. firm White & Case; and
French firm Gide Loyrette Nouel, which has
established official offices in Tunisia, Algeria,
and Morocco. While some firms are deploy-
ing more London-, New York–, or Middle
