Montréal boutique Woods is revered not only as one of the strongest boutiques in the city but one of the strongest litigation groups of any firm in Québec. Perhaps even more impressive is how the firm has etched itself this position while remaining the most unanimously revered in terms of collegiality as well. “Of course, we see Woods all the time,” states one peer, “but they are really more friends than competitors.” A client declares, “Woods is the firm to go to for the cases that tend to go the distance and don’t settle.” One client that has been observed to increasingly call on Woods’s service is Quebecor. “They have become the Quebecor firm of choice – the level of work they get from them is insane! Woods has always done a lot of telecom work but this past year, wow…” With an enviable degree of bench strength – with a healthy percentage of its staff ranked as litigation stars – Woods has also demonstrated its ability to reinvent and reinvigorate itself, with many of its stars “at the younger end, only in their forties.”
Few would dispute that the firm’s center of gravity is Patrick Ouellet, an all-purpose trial lawyer revered by seemingly the entirety of the Montréal bar. Ouellet also successfully represented a defendant against Canada Life Assurance Company, which claimed that a group of defendants, including the client, made false representations to induce it to participate in an overly complex credit insurance plan reinsured by a captive insurance in Barbados. More recently, Ouellet led Air India to a victory in a landmark concerning an attempt by a company that was unsuccessful in enforcing an arbitral judgment entered against the Republic of India to “pierce the corporate veil” by attempt to seize Air India’s assets in Montréal, asserting that the airline was a sovereign entity. Ouellet succeeded in convincing the Court of Appeal to rule that the airline was its own business, and its assets could not be claimed to satisfy an unpaid debt on the part of a sovereign nation. “Patrick continues to dominate,” confirms a peer, “but Woods has plenty of other great people, and I would urge you to look at
Bogdan Catanu! He worked with Patrick on that Air India case.” With a specialty in international arbitration,
Stephen Drymer is purported to be “the busiest arbitration counsel in Canada! He’s often named tribunal secretary or tribunal president. As [firm founder and name partner] James [Woods] gets older, Stephen has really stepped up and brought on all of these massive arbitrations, while also managing an active role as a neutral arbitrator.” Yet another practitioner with cross-border arbitration experience,
Louis Seveno attends to a varied caseload encompassing a range of commercial disputes. Seveno has developed a particular expertise with injunctions and construction and infrastructure work. A peer also notes, “Let’s face it, Woods has some of the top female talent in Montréal.” This observation, evidenced by the likes of
Marie-Louise Delisle and Caroline Biron, was given further gravity with the recruit of
Cara Cameron to its bench in November 2022. Cameron, previously with the Montréal office of Davies, comes equipped with a substantial commercial, securities and white-collar crime expertise.
