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Tonya Mallory
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Contents
VirginiaBusiness.com Virginia’s source for business intelligence.
December 2013 features
37 KEEPING TABS
SPECIAL REPORT: 2013 LEGAL ELITE... p. 35
ON THE ECONOMY
Legal Elite lawyers offer perspectives from their specialties.
41 LEGAL ELITE LISTS 44 LEGAL ELITE PROFILES
COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE: RETAIL>> Photo by Clement Britt
COVER STORY: 2013 VIRGINIA BUSINESS PERSON OF THE YEAR>>
GAME CHANGER 20 Mallory wants to revolutionize the practice of medicine in the U.S. by Richard Foster
contact us >>
90 AN APPETITE FOR GROWTH
Retail activity picks up in Virginia with a push from grocers and restaurants. by M.J. McAteer
COMMUNITY PROFILE: ROANOKE/NEW RIVER VALLEY>>
95 REGIONAL REVIVAL
Manufacturing, tech sectors helping to rebuild area’s economy. by Mason Adams
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Altria Today
Helping Find Solutions Altria is working to find solutions to today’s tobacco issues. Altria’s companies produce premium tobacco products and wine for adult consumers. As attitudes toward tobacco have changed, we’ve made significant changes in the way we do business. Our companies: s #OMMUNICATE OPENLY ABOUT THE HEALTH RISKS OF TOBACCO, including on our websites – and provide information to help tobacco users who want to quit. s Help reduce underage tobacco use – funding the widely-recognized We Card® age verification program and non-profit community groups that help kids make healthy decisions.
s 3UPPORTED GIVING THE &$! AUTHORITY TO REGULATE TOBACCO n THE only major tobacco company to do so – and continue to talk with policymakers and others to help address industry issues. Our tobacco companies are America’s leading tobacco product manufacturers, with premium brands like Marlboro, Copenhagen and Black & Mild – and we’ll keep working to find solutions that help meet society’s expectations. It’s our way of doing business at Altria today. Philip Morris USA U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Company John Middleton Ste. Michelle Wine Estates Philip Morris Capital Corporation
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www.VirginiaBusiness.com Vol. 28
DECEMBER 2013
No. 12
VIRGINIA BUSINESS PUBLICATIONS LLC
President & Publisher Bernard A. Niemeier Editor Robert C. Powell III Managing Editor Paula C. Squires
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Special Projects Editor Jessica Sabbath Special Projects Asst. Editor Veronica Garabelli Contributing Writers Mason Adams Robert Burke Richard Foster M.J. McAteer
business trends
Gary Robertson Joan Tupponce
AIRPORTS >>
BUSINESS LAW>>
28 FAMILY FEUD
Art Director Adrienne R. Watson
87 NO FLIGHT OF FANCY
Is The Disthene Group settlement a cautionary tale for closely held companies? by Paula C. Squires
Contributing Illustrator Matt Brown Contributing Photographers Clement Britt
Consolidating airline industry makes airports more competitive. by Gary Robertson
Rick DeBerry Steven Mantilla Mark Rhodes Production Manager Kevin L. Dick
TECHNOLOGY>>
COMMERCIAL INSURANCE >>
Circulation Manager Karen Chenault
93 A SAFER DRIVE?
81 ASSESSING THE DANGER
Virginia Tech institute tests automated vehicle technologies. by Richard Foster
Many companies facing broader risks than before. by Joan Tupponce
84 MARKEL EXPANDS
HEALTH CARE>>
100 NAVIGATING THE
ITS SCOPE
Alterra deal extends its presence in reinsurance and the global marketplace.
PITFALLS
Website improves, but wave of cancellations upsets policyholders. by Robert Burke
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Letters to the Editor
Full effects of the sequester’s damage are yet to be seen To the Editor, In fiscal year 2013, we saw the sequester do great damage to the U.S. military’s Fairfax County feels the effects of Washington’s blunders readiness [“Fairfax F feels the effects of Washington’s blunders,� editor’s column, November issue]. The deployment of an entire carrier group to the Persian Gulf, and maintenance for hundreds of aircraft and ships, were cancelled. One third of the entire aircraft fleet (including many combat units) of the Air Force was stood down for a lack of funding. The Army and the Marines have canceled training for all their units except those deploying, or preparing to deploy, to Afghanistan or South Korea. InsideView
from the Editor
by Robert Powell
• • • • •
airfax County is an economic juggernaut. Nonetheless, one of its biggest assets, proximity to Washington, D.C., is becoming a liability. Virginia’s most populous county (approaching 1.2 million residents), Fairfax has a lot going for it: With a median family income of $124,831 in 2011, Fairfax is the second-wealthiest county in the nation. Its unemployment rate for July, the latest month available, was 4.3 percent, one and a half percentage points lower than the state average. The county is home to 10 companies on the Fortune 500 list.The group likely will grow to 11 when Hilton Worldwide becomes a publicly owned company. The county accounts for 48 percent of U.S. government contract dollars awarded in Virginia, more than $24 billion in fiscal year 2012. More than 6,700 technology firms employ more than 144,000 workers in the county, making it the largest concentration of technology jobs of any major U.S. market.
In addition, the reach of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority would be the envy of many state governments. It has U.S. offices in Tysons Corner, Los Angeles and Boston, and foreign offices in Bangalore, London, Seoul and Tel Aviv. Likely as a result of its overseas presence, the county is home to nearly 400 companies from 42 countries. The Fairfax EDA seems to have a Midas touch in reeling in business prospects. It usually bests frustrated competitors in the District of Columbia and Maryland in any contest for a highly sought-after prize like the Northrop Grumman headquarters, which relocated from Los Angeles to the Merrifield area in 2011. One of Fairfax’s best selling points has been its location just outside Washington. Northrop Grumman moved its headquarters to be closer to its biggest customer, the federal government. Being near the capital also is the reason that more than 300 trade groups and professional associations have their headquarters in the county. But proximity to D.C. also means being subject to the erratic vicissitudes of the federal government. While Fairfax has succeeded in diversifying its economy in recent years, about 14 percent of its residents are federal government employees and many others work for government contractors. The Fairfax County EDA says the commercial real estate vacancy rate in the county in June was running 16.9 percent, up from a normal level of 10 to 12 percent. That represents about 18 million square feet of empty space.
The Reston skyline in Fairfax County.
84
NOVEMBER 2013
In addition, the number of Fairfax homes in foreclosure rose 144 percent in September, the largest increase among counties with populations of at least 1 million, according to Bloomberg News. The culprit in both cases is sequestration, the 10-year, $1.2 trillion cycle of automatic budget cuts to defense and domestic programs that Congress and the president blundered into earlier this year. �Sequestration has had a trickle-down effect, dampening confidence and creating an atmosphere of uncertainty,� says Gerald Gordon, the president and CEO of the Fairfax County EDA. The Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center told Bloomberg News the jump in foreclosures was caused by “sequester pain� felt by federal employees facing furloughs starting in June. Fairfax’s high vacancy rate and rising foreclosures were recorded before another political impasse caused a partial shutdown of the federal government beginning Oct. 1. Virginia, which is home to more than 170,000 federal employees, was expected to be the state most affected by the shutdown, although the damage would not be known until revenue data were announced in late October. Fairfax’s experience under the shutdown could make a difference in that state total. The county is a net exporter of state revenue, getting back only 19 cents of every state tax dollar it generates, according to the Fairfax County EDA. The sad truth is that many other local economies in Virginia, few of whom have Fairfax’s advantages, also are paying the price for the government’s senseless, self-inflicted wounds. The meat-ax cuts of sequestration, for example, were supposed to be so indiscriminate and “stupid� that no fool, Democrat or Republican, would allow them to be enacted. Virtually every Virginia elected official opposed the defense cuts because of the effect they could have on the state economy. The idea behind sequestration, hatched as a bargaining move in the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis, was to force the opposing parties to the negotiating table to craft an intelligent process to cut federal spending. That didn’t happen, so sequestration took effect by default. The last-minute deal that reopened the government and narrowly avoided economic catastrophe resolved nothing, setting the scene for another test of brinkmanship this winter. The same sort of slow-moving political train wreck led the partial government shutdown and threatened to push the government into default. During the shutdown, former Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh told an audience at the College of William and Mary that political compromise once was considered an art. Now, he said, it is condemned as an act of betrayal by fringe elements in both parties. Politicians pride themselves by standing by their principles but accomplish nothing for the good of the country. The result is a federal government that lurches from crisis to crisis with no coherent plan. If the Washington Redskins are looking for a new team name, I have a suggestion: the Washington Gridlocks. That says it all about their hometown. Photo courtesy Fairfax County Economic Development Authority
And yet, that was just the foretaste of the damage sequestration will do, in the long term, to America’s military if this cretinous, suicidal mechanism is allowed to remain the law. According to the Army’s chief of staff, he’ll have only two to three fully combat-ready brigades left. The Air Force’s chief of staff says he’ll have to retire entire fleets of planes, including the B-1, the A-10 and the KC-10 tanker. The chief of naval operations says he’d have to defer maintenance on hundreds and hundreds of Navy aircraft and warships, reduce planned ship and plane buys significantly, and be unable to enter into money-saving multiyear procurement contracts. The Marines would have to cancel every modernization program except their new amphibious tractor. And all four services will decline dramatically in size: for example, the
Army would be cut to 380,000 active duty personnel, the Marines to 150,000 or fewer, and the Navy will decline to just 230 vessels, at a time it can meet only 59 percent of COCOM’s [Combatant Command’s] requests for warships. And since the Navy will, like other services, be hit hard, Virginia and its shipbuilding industry will suffer greatly, too. The only thing good about this damage to the nation’s military is that it has, and will continue to, utterly disprove the falsity of those who downplayed, and continue to downplay, the damage this mechanism is doing to America’s defense. Zbigniew Mazurak Norfolk Mazurak is a defense correspondent with ConservativeDailyNews.
Stop Searching, Start Finding. Everything your business needs to grow and thrive is in Harrisonburg, VA – access to major markets, a growing technology base, an educated workforce, business and university partnerships, and a 5-star rated quality of life. Visit HarrisonburgDevelopment.com today to ďŹ nd your perfect Harrisonburg location with our new property locator.
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DECEMBER 2013
Upcoming Events in Virginia’s business community Items on the calendar alend aree just a sample of statewide business events in the commonwealth this month. To see more events ts vi visit www.VirginiaBusiness.com. ww.Vi To submit an event for consideration, email Veronica Garabelli att vgarabelli@ vgarabelli@virginiabusiness.com b ll about two months before the event.
DECEMBER EVENTS Dec. 3 Hampton Roads Chamber of Commerce’s Holiday Gala & Marketplace Virginia Beach This yearly event at the Founders Inn and Spa allows companies to market their products to businesspeople. www.hamptonroadschamber.com
Dec. 5 Asian Chamber Gala Richmond
This annual event at The Jefferson Hotel is sponsored by the Virginia Asian Chamber of Commerce and Virginia Asian Foundation. www.asianchambergala2013-eorg. eventbrite.com
Dec. 5 Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce’s Annual Meeting of the Membership Roanoke More than 500 people are expected at The Hotel Roanoke & Conference Center for Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce’s annual meeting. www.roanokechamber.org
Dec. 6 Ultimate NOVA Business Expo Fairfax This event at Shriners International is meant to help businesses grow and promote themselves. www. ultimatenovabizexpo. com
Dec. 10 Make Them Stick – Resolutions with an Impact Henrico Hosted by the Richmond chapter of National Association of Women Business Owners, the event at Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens is aimed at teaching participants how to keep New Year’s resolutions. www.nawborichmond.org
Dec. 12 Fairfax Chamber’s Annual Holiday Reception McLean The Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce will hold its holiday party at the Hilton McLean Tysons Corner. www.fairfaxchamber.org
www.VirginiaBusiness.com
VIRGINIA BUSINESS
7
Advertiser Index
Index of companies and individuals A Advance Auto Parts Inc. 98 Alterra Capital Holdings Ltd. ......................... 84
B Bell, Troy ....................... Bertini, Lisa A. .............. Blanco, Myra................. Bopp, Aric ..................... Bowen, Robert .............. Brian Wishneff & Associates .............. Bryant, John ................. Burke, Michele .............. Burke, Michele K........... Burns, Chris..................
89 64 93 95 89 14 97 29 30 81
C Campbell, Greg ............. 87 Carilion Clinic................ 95 Celanese Acetate........... 95 Center for Advanced Drug Research................. 16 Cha, Derek .................... 92 Chapman, Bill ............... 98 Chapman, Dr. Christopher C. ............................ 19 Charlottesville Albemarle Airport, ................... 88 Colgate, Curtis .............. 28 Colgate, Jeanne Dixon .. 31 Colgate Sr., Marion J. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Boydâ&#x20AC;? .................... 29 Colucci, Thomas J. . 37, 70
Cornerstone Architects PLC ......................... 14 Courtney, Mark ............. 88 Cox, Robert K. ........ 37, 54 Craddock Jr., John H. ... 28 Crawford, Melinda ........ 88 Curry, Matt.................... 18 Curtis, Marshall M. ....... 62 Cushman & Wakefield|Thalhimer 90
G
D
Health Diagnostic Laboratory .............. 20 Hickory Ground Solutions LLC ......................... 17 High Liner Foods Inc. ... 12 Horner & Perks............. 15 Hybrid Shop, The.......... 18
Davison, Larry .............. 98 Decker, Keith................. 12 Denison, James ............ 92 Devilâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Backbone Brewing .................. 97 Dingus, Thomas A. ....... 93 Disthene Group Inc., The 28 Divaris, Gerald S. .......... 92 Dixon, Guy B................. 28 Dixon Jr., Gene B. ......... 28 Doerzaph, Zachary........ 94 Doughty, Beth ............... 95 Dwelle, Mark ................. 84 Dyson, Lisa ................... 24
F Farnam, Robert............. Fenton, Leslye S. .......... Fickensher, Ross........... Fillingane, Dr. Sam........ Flying Mouse Brewery .. Friedman, Frank K.........
84 44 14 23 97 46
Gee III, Everett W. ......... General Auto Parts International Inc. .... Good Food â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Good People..................... Grede Holdings LLC ..... Greeson, Thomas W. ....
31 98 97 95 60
H
J Johnson, Steve ............. 92 Jones, Christopher A. ...................... 37, 48 J.R. Tharpe Trucking Co. Inc. ......................... 31
K Kapadia, Dr. Shaiv......... Katz, Phyllis C. .............. Kelley, Jeff .................... Khan, Faisal .................. Kim, Annah ................... Kodukula, Krishna ........ Kyanite Mining Corp. ....
22 66 22 98 92 16 28
AEP ...............................................33 Aetna ............................................85 Albo & Oblon ................................67 Allen&Allen - Jamie Hessel...........78 Altria ...............................................3 Appalachian Power .......................96 Association Of Fundraising Proff. .23 Bankers Insurance ........................82 Barnes & Diehl..............................43 Batzli Stiles ...................................45 Butler Royal ..................................69 Christian Barton............................71 City of Harrisonburg .......................6 CowanGates-Frank Cowan............77 CowanGates-Melanie Friend .........77 David Ventker -Ventker & Warman79 Dimuro Ginsburg ..........................79 Dixon Hughes ...............................38 DurretteCrump..............................65 FCCI ..............................................26 Franklin Solutions .........................77
Fulton Bank...................................25 Gentry Locke Rakes & Moore ........5 Hall & Hall.....................................55 Hampton Roads Community Fd. ..65 HDJN ............................................39 Juridical Solutions-John McGrath 77 Locke & Quinn ..............................51 Luis Abreu ....................................73 Martinair .......................................89 McCandlish Lillard ........................36 Mclean Faulconer .........................32 MichieHamlet................................59 Norris & St. Clair PC.....................77 Owen & Owens-Mary Owens .......78 Owen & Owens-Sam Kaufman .....78 Pender & Coward .........................75 Premier Bank ..................................8 RCM&D ........................................83 ReedSmith ....................................53 Regent School of Law ....................1 Roanoke College...........................97 Rutherfoord ..................................80
L
McNamee, Brett Womack ................. Meredith, Joe................ Moore, R.C. .................. Moos, Walter ................ Morrill, Chris................. Morrison, Bart .............. Moseley, Walton ........... Mullan, Dr. Michael J. ...
LeClairRyan .................. 28 Lynchburg Regional Airport .................... 88
M Maggard, Derick ........... Mallory, Tonya .............. Malone, Christopher M. Markel, Anthony ........... Markel Corp. ................. Mauck, Hutch ............... McConnell, Joe ............. McDonnell, Gov. Bob ....
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95 20 52 84 84 84 21 96
90 95 81 16 98 17 31 19
N Newcomb, Sharon ........ Newport News/ Williamsburg International ........... Nielsen, Connie............. Nielsen, John ................ Norfolk International Airport ....................
29 89 91 91 88
O Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Donnell, Patrick H. .... 56 Ostroff, Gretchen M. ..... 74 Owens, Mary Burkey .... 58
P Parkway Brewing Company ................ 97 Perito, Paul L. ............... 19 Peterson, Richard ......... 14
R Reamer, Tim ................. Redcoat Solutions ........ Richmond International Airport .................... Roanoke Regional Airport .................... Roberts Jr., George H. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Skipâ&#x20AC;? ..................... Rose, Neil L. ................. Roush, Jane Marum .....
91 16 89 88 50 72 29
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DECEMBER 2013
Saez, Ignacio ................ 95 Schutt, Chris ................. 82 Scott Insurance ............ 84 Shenandoah Valley Regional Airport .................... 87 Shifflett, Garrett ............ 14 Shima, Hiroshi .............. 24 Shuck, Jacqueline......... 88
Sacks & Sacks ..............................67 Sands Anderson ...........................40 Scott Insurance ............................ifc Sevila Saunders ............................63 Spotts Fain....................................63 StellarOne .....................................98 The Boleman Law Firm .................78 The Susan Hicks Group ................59 Thompson McMullan ...................76 Union First Market Bank ...............37 Vanderpool Frostik........................61 Vandeventer Black ........................57 VEDP .............................. Back cover VMFA ............................................25 VSCPA ..........................................10 VT University Relations ................99 Walton & Adams ..........................79 Willcox & Savage..........................47 William & Mary Mason School.....24 Woods Rogers..............................73 Yama Shansab ..............................77
Skunda, Robert............. Snyder, Mike â&#x20AC;&#x153;Kenoâ&#x20AC;?..... SRI Biosciences............ SRI International........... Stanchina, John ............ Star Scientific Inc. ........ Stone Ridge Development .......... Strickland, Wayne......... Sullenberger, Robin ...... Summers, Bob.............. Sunken City Brewery .... Supply Chain Visions LLC ......................... sweetFrog ..................... Sydnor, Walker .............
23 97 16 16 82 19 14 96 16 15 97 17 92 84
T TECHLAB ...................... TechPad ........................ Tharpe, Tim .................. Thompson, Bruce ......... Tron, Jesse ...................
95 15 31 32 90
V Virginia Tech ................. 93 Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and Research Institute .. 95 Virginia Techâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Corporate Research Center ..... 95 Virginia Tech Transportation Institute .................. 93
W Walker, Ed ..................... Warnick, G. Russell ...... Washington Dulles International and Reagan National..... Washington Redskins... Weaver, Tenley .............. Williams, Raven ............ Williams Sr., Jonnie ...... Wolf, Thomas ............... Wright, Rob ..................
98 25 87 22 97 92 19 29 92
Y Yingling, Rob ................ 87
OurView from the Publisher
Don’t mistake politics for business by Bernie Niemeier
T
he sky’s been falling in Dee Cee for a while now. We’ve been sequestered, jumped over the fiscal cliff, shut down, debt ceilinged, Obamacared and so on. Interestingly, all of this political woe really hasn’t mattered much on Wall Street. In fact, just the opposite is true. When talk of lower government spending turns toward the possibility of the Federal Reserve backing away from its $85 billion in monthly bond purchases, it sends shudders through the markets. Businesses benefit from low interest rates. Government spending creates jobs helping to drive consumer spending. Though politically unpopular, this is apparently the new normal for economic stability. The irony is that what makes sense personally is often different from what makes sense politically. Neither our pocketbooks nor our politics follow the same calculus as business profits. Equating politics and business should lead to the conclusion that the sky has been falling both in Dee Cee and on Wall Street, something that clearly hasn’t been happening. The S&P 500 and the Dow Jones industrial average have been hitting record highs in recent months. Going back over two years, a time before sequestration, the S&P 500 has risen more than 40 percent — not a bad return for 24 months, during a time when many have assumed that political instability should imply economic uncertainty. Looking at Virginia’s 15 largest public companies between November 2011 and November 2013, only one of them dropped in share price, and the unweighted average share price gain for the group was about 40 percent, roughly even with the S&P 500. Of special note is Smithfield Foods, which exited the ranks of Virginia’s public companies in September after being bought by Shuanghui International Holdings Ltd. Nevertheless, Smithfield’s stock rose over 50 percent during its last two years of public trading.
Photo by Mark Rhodes
Shares of Leidos Holdings Inc. are a bit more complicated. The company formerly known as SAIC underwent a spin-off and 1-to-4 reverse stock split in September. Accounting for the split and adding back the spinoff, the pro forma combined Leidos/SAIC price per share has gone up a bit over 50 percent in the past 24 months. Alpha Natural Resources the only company in Virginia’s top 15 to decline in value over the past two years, plummeted by 70 percent. Increased environmental regulation, lower foreign demand for metallurgical coal and an increased supply of lower priced shale gas have combined to dampen share prices across the entire coal sector. Genworth’s share price gain of 100 percent over the past two years makes it the leader among Virginia’s top 15 public companies. New CEO Tom McInerney www.VirginiaBusiness.com
shelved a planned IPO for the company’s Australian mortgage insurer and cut costs. At the same time the company has benefited from increasing pricing power for long-term care insurance and a recovery in the U.S. mortgage insurance market. Similarly, Northrop Grumman has seen it’s share price rise by more than 90 percent since last 2011. No doubt, sequestration has been difficult, but it hasn’t done much to impair the value of this company or for that matter any of the largest government contractors in Virginia. This brings me back to politics and business. Despite ongoing saber rattling about government bond ratings, confidence in markets, and the reputation of our democracy, business seems to be doing okay. The Great Recession officially ended in June 2009. Recessions are defined by economic measures, not political ones. Though the U.S. political environment remains embarrassingly choked by partisanship, business earnings continue to improve and opportunities exist for those willing to seize them. As mentioned, low interest rates are good for business. A recent Bloomberg News article on cable-magnate John Malone quoted him as saying, “A combination of cheap money and a gloomy view of the future gives rise to opportunity for those who aren’t quite so gloomy.” That’s’ a pretty good description of what opportunity looks like these days. It’s something that can be missed by clinging to a pessimistic view of business conditions. Economic ups and downs tend to run in about 10-year cycles. With the last recession ending in mid-2009, we are somewhere around half-way to the next peak. Looking at the recent results of Virginia’s top companies, things are better than they seem. As we approach 2014 politics may continue to disappoint, but business is doing just fine. VIRGINIA BUSINESS
9
Life gets complicated; money is tight. I need to get smarter about our finances – and taxes. Not just for April 15th, but for our future.
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Out & About with Virginia Business
Virginia Summit on Economic Competitiveness & Higher Education, Richmond
1
2
3
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Photos by Kevin Schindler, courtesy Virginia Chamber of Commerce
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1.
Sherelyn D. Hammett, a health strategies consultant, talks with Bill Ermatinger at UnitedHealthcare interactive display.
2.
Gov. Bob McDonnell; Ryan Wall, University of Phoenix; and Jennifer Burns, University of Phoenix.
3.
Glenda Scales, Virginia Tech.
4.
Barry DuVal, Virginia Chamber of Commerce, and Bill Ermatinger, Huntington Ingalls Industries.
5.
Carol Stillman, Cisco Systems Inc.
6.
Don Finley, Virginia Business Higher Education Council, and Laura Fornash, secretary of education.
7.
Gil Bland, State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, and Tony Maggio, House Appropriations Committee.
7 Share photos of special events at your company with Virginia Business. Email them to Adrienne R. Watson, arwatson@virginiabusiness.com. Photos not used in the magazine may be posted on our Web site.
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VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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Global/Local View: High Liner Foods Inc., Newport News President: Keith Decker Industry: food production Website: highlinerfoods.com
Fishy business High Liner Foods expands in Newport News and abroad after acquiring Icelandic Seafood
Global
“Today we are the largest producer of frozen valueadded seafood — battered, glazed and sauced — for retail chains and food service,” says Keith Decker.
Economy in Reykjavik ykj The capital and largest city in Iceland, Reykjavik is a major player in the economic growth of the country. Industries include geothermal energy, seafood, biotech, medical equipment and information technology. Large employers include retail giant Hagar, the marine energy management and research company Marorka, clothing manufacturer 66°North and airlines Air Iceland and Icelandair. In 2011, the city built The Harpa concert hall and conference center, making it more attractive in the meeting planning industry.
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by Joan Tupponce
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he fish in an Arby’s fish sandwich may be harvested from international waters, but the breaded filet is made at the High Liner Foods plant in Newport News. “It’s the company’s most wellknown product that comes out of that plant,” says Keith Decker, the company president and chief operating officer. High Liner also makes fish filets for McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s, as well as beebattered cod for Sam’s Club. Founded in 1899, High Liner Foods Inc. is based in a small fishing community in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. “It started as a fishing company producing salt fish,” says Decker. High Liner went on to become one of the two largest fishing companies in Canada. “When the fisheries were shut down in eastern Canada in the early 1990s, High Liner went into the world market and created a name for itself as an importer and marketer of fish products,” Decker says. In December 2011, the company acquired the U.S. subsidiary of Icelandic Seafood in Newport News for about $230 million. Icelandic was one of the largest suppliers of
DECEMBER 2013
value-added seafood to the U.S. food service market, so the deal raised High Liner’s profile as a player in the industry. Icelandic is one of four U.S. companies that High Liner has acquired in the past seven years. “Our sales have Decker grown dramatically,” Decker says. “Today we are the largest producer of frozen value-added seafood — battered, glazed and sauced — for retail chains and food service.” The Newport News facility opened in 1997 and dealt primarily with food service accounts such as schools and chain restaurants in the U.S. “They were a very good competitor of ours,” Decker says. “It was a logical acquisition to add that portfolio into ours. From our perspective it was a great facility, probably the newest manufacturing plant in the U.S. for seafood.” High Liner liked the fact that Newport News had a large workforce to draw from as well as access to port facilities. “It is also ideally located for trucking logistics across the U.S.,” Decker says.
The company has about 420 employees in Newport News and 1,500 companywide. The 250,000-square-foot Newport News plant, one of five company plants in North America, produces about 65 million pounds of seafood. High Liner is investing $6.6 million to modernize and expand the facility with new equipment and systems to increase production. Work is underway on the expansion, and the company has started hiring for 57 new positions. “Our vision is to be the leading supplier of frozen seafood in North America, and this expansion of our Newport News operation puts us a step closer to that goal,” Decker says, noting that all of the company’s sales are focused on North America. High Liner processes more than 20 species of fish from
Local Economy in Newport News
Photo courtesy High Liner Foods Inc.
more than 30 countries around the world, from tilapia and salmon to cod and shrimp. “We bring raw fish material through the Port of Norfolk and also by truck,” Decker says. The company sells to every major supermarket, restaurant and food service chain as well as club stores in North America. Its brands include Fisher Boy and Sea Cuisine as well as High Liner. “We have the leading market share in the food service sector, but we are not a leader on the retail side,” Decker says. “There are two or three companies more dominant on that side.” High Liner gets seafood from around the world. Alaska is a source of salmon as is Russia, which also provides cod, haddock and pollock. Shrimp comes from Southeast Asia and Central America. “We also get product out of China
and Scandinavian countries, such as Norway and Iceland,” Decker says. The business has its challenges. Salmon runs, for example, may occur only eight weeks during the salmon season. “We have to take seasonal fishery and produce a product that is the same size, quality and price and deliver it 52 weeks a year to chain restaurants or supermarkets,” Decker says. Because of the seasonality of salmon runs, High Liner has to make an educated guess as to how much salmon it will need for the year. “We are buying and committing to a year’s worth of inventory upfront,” Decker says. “It could be as much as 50 million pounds of product.” By the end of this year, the company will purchase all its seafood from certified sustainable or responsible fisheries
and aquaculture farms. Because of its Icelandic acquisition, High Liner has strong purchasing ties with Reykjavik, Iceland, buying cod and haddock from local fisheries. “We import a lot of products from them,” Decker says. “They produce fantastic quality products that are well respected in the U.S. food service market.” When he meets with businessmen in Reykjavik, Decker finds them to be more conservative than American businessmen. “They are more reserved,” he says. “As far as doing business with them, they are excellent businessmen. They have a lot of pride in their country. [It is] a great country to work in.” Business meetings are similar to meetings in the U.S., he adds. “They all speak excellent English.”
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Known for its shipbuilding industry, Newport News also is home to a fast growing technology sector. Other industries include healthcare services, manufacturing and wholesale distribution. Large employers include Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc. (the parent company of Newport News Shipbuilding), Riverside Health System, Ferguson Enterprises/ Wolseley North America, the Department of Defense and Canon Virginia Inc. Canon is investing $27 million to expand its operation in the city. The city also has several proposed developments in the works, including the $250 million Tech Center development that includes commercial and research enterprises as well as residential housing. The center is a partnership between the city and construction company W.M. Jordan, developer S.J. Collins Enterprises, Jefferson Lab and the Virginia Tech Foundation. Also underway is a $48.2 million, 22acre mixed-use project in the city’s Southeast Community. Brooks Crossing is being designed as a project that will help renovate this part of the city and so far has attracted a new police precinct and a 30,000-square-foot commercial building. Construction is scheduled to begin this spring.
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Southern Virginia For the Record Danville Community College garnered six awards, including two each of first, second and third place awards, at the 2013 National Council for Marketing and Public Relations District II Medallion Awards competition held at Hilton Head Island, S.C. The annual awards were presented for outstanding achievement in marketing communications and honor the work of community college marketing and public relations professionals in the region. District II is made up of community and technical colleges in 11 states. (WorkItSoVa.com) Gov.-elect Terry McAuliffe said at an event in Norfolk that he would veto any legislation to facilitate uranium mining in Virginia. Mining interests have been trying for years to get a 31-year-old moratorium lifted so the ore can be mined from a rich uranium deposit in Pittsylvania County. The issue also has resonance in Hampton Roads, which draws drinking water from Lake Gaston, downstream from the uranium site. (The Virginian-Pilot) The Mid-Atlantic Broadband Communities Corp., a wholesale open-access network transport provider, completed a $20 million capital project to connect more than 120 K-12 schools in Southern Virginia. The completion of this project ensures that every school in Southern Virginia now has access to an advanced fiber optic network, achieving the mission of delivering robust, scalable band-width that can meet their needs now or 20 years from now. (WorkItSoVa.com) Pittsylvania County is applying for a $700,000 grant from the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development to install utilities for a prospective industry that would bring more than 100 jobs to the Dan River Region. Dubbed “Project Tire,” the endeavor would involve a tire-andrubber recycling company with plans to construct a 40,000-45,000-square-foot building on a 20-acre site in Cane Creek Centre Industrial Park. (Danville Register & Bee) The Southern Virginia Higher Education Center in South Boston has been awarded an $85,000 Rural Health Network Development Planning grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Health Resources and Services Administration. The grant will be used to coordinate efforts of regional health-care providers as they consider community health-care needs and what this means for health-care-worker roles moving forward. (WorkItSoVa.com)
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Virginia firms aid Danville redevelopment by Veronica Garabelli
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former tobacco processing center and seed warehouse in Danville is one of several buildings in Danville’s River District being turned into chic living spaces. The 40,000-square-foot Smith Seeds building has been turned into 20 one- and twobedroom apartments, featuring stainless steel appliances, a fitness center and exposed brick and wood. There are also plans for three commercial spaces for the ground floor of the four-story building. “They are larger than you typically get in an apartment,” says Richard Peterson, principal at Richmond-based Cornerstone Architects PLC, who worked on the project. “There’s a lot of space, both ceiling height and space in the floor plan.” Danville is in the third year of its River District Development Project, which aims to revitalize the city’s downtown and drive economic development. Danville’s economy has suffered in recent years because of the loss of large industries such as tobacco and textiles. According to Danville’s Office of Economic Development, the River District has seen $78 million in private investment during the past five years. The district includes Danville’s central business and tobacco warehouse districts and manufacturing area.
People Travis Buchanan resigned as project manager for the R&D Center for Advanced Manufacturing & Energy Efficiency in South Boston. Buchanan took a position with C.R. Onsrud in Troutman, N.C., that will allow him to spend more time with his family. A national search to fill his position will be starting soon. (WorkItSoVa.com)
The former Smith Seeds building in Danville has been turned into 20 one- and two-bedroom apartments.
Photo courtesy Cornerstone Architects PLC
Winchester-based Stoneridge Development and Roanoke-based Brian Wishneff & Associates are also working on redevelopment projects in The River District. The firms are rehabilitating the approximately 25,000-square-foot Wise-Hundley building on Main Street. The project is still in development, but the plan is to have commercial space on the bottom floor and 12 to 14 apartments on the upper floor, says John Willingham of Stoneridge Development. He hopes to have the project finished by next fall. Stoneridge Development and Brian Wishneff & Associates also are developing the former RJR building on Bridge Street. The bottom floor of the roughly 60,000-square-foot building would be used for commercial space, Willingham says. Plans for the rest of the building are still in
Linda Lawrence Dalton, co-owner of Lawrence Distributing Co. in Danville, elected to serve as Virginia’s representative on the board of directors for the National Beer Wholesalers Association. (WorkItSoVa.com) Michelle Gaydica named senior vice president, retail banking, American National Bank and Trust Co., Danville. She was director of secondary market mortgage at First Community Bank in
development. Richmond-based developers Garrett Shifflett and Ross Fickensher also continue to work on Pemberton Lofts on Bridge Street. The second phase will add 50 apartments to the project, which currently includes 62 units and two commercial spaces. Shifflett and Fickensher also plan to develop 610 Craghead St. into 40 apartments and one commercial space. The Craghead Street apartments will have a look similar to Pemberton Lofts, which include granite countertops, stainless steel appliances and hardwood floors. Peterson says Cornerstone Architects was drawn to Danville’s well-built, underutilized historic buildings. Other draws included a business-friendly atmosphere and institutions in the area such as Averett University and Danville Regional Medical Center.
Winston-Salem, N.C. (News release) Robert Lankford, of Red Oak, named director of operations, Mecklenburg Electric Cooperative (MEC), Chase City. He has led MEC’s underground and apparatus department for more than 20 years. (WorkItSoVa.com) David Lipscomb, of South Hill, named vice president of member and energy services, MEC, Chase City.
The new position merges responsibilities from his previous title as MEC’s vice president of district services. (WorkItSoVa.com) Jeff Liverman, the executive director of the Danville Science Center, will be retiring toward the end of this year. He will begin a new position as the executive director of the Jacksonville Center for the Arts in Floyd. (GoDanRiver.com)
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Free gigabit Wi-Fi comes to downtown Blacksburg by Veronica Garabelli
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magine a world where online videos and pages loaded way faster … 100 times faster than the average Internet speed, to be exact. Thanks to a new gigabit Internet network that has come to Southwest Virginia, that’s now a possibility for people in downtown Blacksburg. TechPad, which provides office space for companies in downtown Blacksburg, spearheaded the effort to bring free, public Wi-Fi to the area. TechPad’s founder, Bob Summers, says he started the project after spending three months in Chattanooga, Tenn., where gigabit Internet is available to all businesses and residents. TechPad raised $92,400 in three months using a “crowdsourcing” site, Crowdtilt.com. “I was overwhelmingly surprised how many people contributed,” Summers says. “It was really incredible.” The money will sustain the project for 18 months, and TechPad is close to making the project sustainable for at least three years, Summers says. Part of that funding will come from a $300,000 grant Fitnet (Summers’ telefitness application company) and Virginia Tech received to explore the use of fitness applications on advanced networks. Further funding for the free Wi-Fi in
People Vonya Alleyne, named market vice president for Cox Communications’ Roanoke operations. Alleyne was vice president, human resources for Cox Virginia. (News release) Jon Bartlett, named market president of LewisGale Regional Health System and CEO of LewisGale Medical
Bob Summers is the founder of TechPad in Blacksburg.
Photo courtesy King Crow Media / Kingcrowmedia.com
downtown Blacksburg will come from research dollars and companies buying access to the ultrafast Internet, Summers says. “Imagine a dozen startups that are building gigabit-type applications,” Summers says. “Those companies will pay to have premium-level business access to this network and that will subsidize the public Wi-Fi.” The gigabit network currently is available at Kent Square, a mixed-use development in Blacksburg, and TechPad. Wireless access to the network is available to about 40 percent of downtown Blacksburg. “As time goes by, we’ll be deploying more and more,” Summers says. Several thousand devices have accessed the network since it went live in September, he says. The network has allowed Dave Perks and Andy Horner
Center in Salem. He was president of Abrazo Health Care in Phoenix. (The Roanoke Times) Joseph M. Dill, named vice president of professional services and dental director, Delta Dental of Virginia, Roanoke. Dill was dental director-Western region and director-provider contracting for Delta Dental of California. (News release) Charles Downs, former president of Virginia Western Community College in
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to run their new advertising agency, Horner & Perks, from Blacksburg and Lynchburg. The network, for example, allows Perks, based at TechPad in Blacksburg, and Horner, located in Lynchburg, to share large design files with each other within seconds. “It’s basically like having a conversation with each other when we’re trading files back and forth,” Perks says. The new technology is a far cry from when Perks was attending Virginia Tech in the 1990s when Blacksburg was known as the most wired town in America. Back then, Perk recalls, a file that started downloading at night would finish downloading in the morning. “At the time, it was amazing,” Perks says. “Fast forward 18 years, and now we’re at this. It’s absolutely incredible.”
Roanoke, appointed to The National Society of Collegiate Scholars Community College Advisory Board. (The Roanoke Times) Willie T. Greene Sr., reappointed to the state Board of Social Services. Greene is a self-employed safety consultant and vice mayor of Galax. (News release) Chris Pyle, promoted to vice president, marketing and government relations, Delta Dental of Virginia, Roanoke.
He was director of marketing and community relations. (VirginiaBusiness.com) Robert P. Stephens, associate professor of history at Virginia Tech, named associate dean for undergraduate academic affairs in the university’s College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. (News release)
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Southwest Virginia For the Record Roanoke-based Advance Auto Parts Inc. plans to buy auto parts retailer General Parts International Inc. (GPI) for $2.04 billion, setting the company up to become the largest auto parts retailer in North America. Raleigh-based GPI is a private distributor and supplier of equipment and aftermarket replacement products for commercial markets, operating under the Carquest and Worldpac brands. The transaction, which is subject to regulatory approval and customary closing conditions, is expected to close in late 2013 or early 2014. (VirginiaBusiness.com) Bristol-based coal producer Alpha Natural Resources plans to eliminate about 230 positions throughout the company in the wake of continued financial losses. Company officials have developed a plan to reduce operating and support expenses by at least $200 million in 2014 and beyond. Most of the positions being cut are salaried and about 100 are already vacant and won’t be filled. (Bristol Herald Courier) A study found that the Abingdon-based Barter Theatre has an economic impact of $34 million on its local economy. The report, completed in September, said the nonprofit theater supports 485 jobs. The Barter Theatre has an annual operating budget of more than $6 million. The impact study was prepared by Stephen Powell, CEO of Destination Services LLC; Berkeley Young, president of Young Strategies; and Steve Morse, director of the Hospitality & Tourism Program at the College of Business, Western Carolina University. (VirginiaBusiness.com) Gov. Bob McDonnell announced two Virginia Enterprise Zone (VEZ) designations in Southwest Virginia: Scott County, and a joint zone including the city of Radford and Pulaski County. Each locality will use state and local enterprise zone incentives to create jobs, promote private investment and support the overall growth of the local economy. The program has supported more than $1 billion in investment and the creation of more than 40,000 jobs since 1995. (News release) A New Jersey couple plan to upgrade Smith Mountain Lake Airport in Bedford County after buying the facility from Joseph Borgess. Two married aviation buffs who reside at a New Jersey air park paid about $1 million for the nearly 50-acre airport property, said Mark Dalton of Dalton & Co. Realtors in Lynchburg. Dalton declined to identify the couple and said they will own the airport through a limited liability company. (The Roanoke Times)
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Shenandoah Valley For th th the he eR Re Record e ecco co orrd rd Amherst Family Practice and Winchester Medical Consultants have created Integrated Physician Services. Although each practice retains its independence, location and patients, the organization is working on some added benefits for its patients, such as a system allowing patients to pay their bills online and download documents before arriving for a medical appointment. (Northern Virginia Daily) Winchester-based Angle Valley Press, an independent publisher of books on the Civil War, has announced that it has partnered with Savas Beatie. Savas Beatie, which is a military and general history publishing company, has agreed to distribute titles by Angle Valley Press into non-book trade accounts within the U.S. and Canada. (Northern Virginia Daily) Washington, D.C.-based DBT-DATA completed the purchase of its fifth data center, the 13-acre Cyber Integration Center in Harrisonburg. DBT-DATA is a real estate investment and development firm that designs, constructs, owns and operates technology-related real estate properties. It has four data center properties in Ashburn, an area through which 60 percent of the nation’s Internet traffic travels on a daily basis. (VirginiaBusiness.com) After reaching the halfway mark in September, construction on the Dominion Virginia Power plant in Warren County is steadily chugging along toward powering 325,000 Northern and Central Virginia homes with electricity in the fourth quarter of 2014. The 1,329 megawatt natural gasfired power plant, located three miles north of Front Royal, is being constructed by a joint venture consisting of Zachry Industrial and Burns & McDonnell, and will be owned and operated by Dominion Virginia Power. (Northern Virginia Daily) The Market Collective opened Oct. 4 in Luray and was scheduled to operate for three months. The market, created by the Luray Downtown Initiative (LDI), offers fresh produce and organic meats alongside locally made arts and crafts. LDI originated The Collective as a means to occupy vacant Main Street properties and revitalize downtown by attracting visitors during the busy autumn and holiday seasons. (Page News and Courier) Harrisonburg-based RMH Healthcare is changing its name to reflect its ties with Sentara Healthcare, a Norfolk-based health system. The new name, Sentara RMH Medical Center, will take effect on Jan. 1. The change conforms to Sentara’s naming structure. RMH merged with Sentara in May 2011. As part of its merger agreement, the RMH board agreed to transition the hospital’s name over time. (VirginiaBusiness.com)
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DECEMBER 2013
SRI Shenandoah Valley plans third spinoff by Veronica Garabelli
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n research and development, spinoff companies are more like slow-cooked barbecue than fast food. “These things take a long time,” says Robin Sullenberger, the retired Shenandoah Valley Partnership CEO who helped bring the nonprofit R&D company SRI International to Harrisonburg seven years ago. “That’s one of the things that a lot of people don’t understand about the spinoff,” Sullenberger says. “That world is complicated. It involves a lot of legal issues. It involves investment issues and various things and, of course, the products that are going out in the marketplace have to be firmly believed in terms of the ability to commercialize them.” Good things, however, come to those who wait. SRI Shenandoah Valley now has begun to sprout companies. The subsidiary of Californiabased SRI has launched two spinoffs in 2013, and a third company, focused on cancer diagnostics, is in the works. “So, think about once a year, from your annual physical, being able to tell whether you need to worry about cancer coming back or cancer starting in the first place,” says Walter Moos, vice president
People The following people were re-elected to the Virginia Manufacturers Association board of directors: Jack Abato, vice president, Cadence/Specialty Blades Inc., Staunton; Dilton “Dee” Gibbs, plant manager, Kraft Foods, Winchester; David Gum, president, National Fruit Product Co., Winchester; and Randy Smith, vice president, McKee Foods Corp., Stuarts Draft. (News release)
SRI Shenandoah Valley recently completed an expansion of its Harrisonburg facility.
Photo courtesy SRI International
of SRI Biosciences, in describing the new company. The first SRI spinoff occurred in March with the creation of Redcoat Solutions, a company that’s developing bed-bug detection products. The second spinoff, RioGin, is working on a technology to increase the half-life and reduce the side-effects of certain drugs, such as those used to treat cancer and diabetes. Spinoffs aren’t the only news at SRI Shenandoah Valley. The firm recently completed a 40,000-squarefoot expansion at its Center for Advanced Drug Research (CADRE) in Harrisonburg. The $2.8 million project includes more than 2,500 square feet of laboratory and storage space. “It has been a fantastic
Caitlin Clark, named trade manager for the Valley and Northwest regions for Virginia Economic Development Partnership - International Trade. She was a research manager for the Virginia Leaders in Export Trade (VALET) Program. (News release) Kevin Fauber, named town
time,” says Krishna Kodukula, head of SRI Shenandoah Valley, who moved from California to start CADRE in 2006. “We have worked on very important problems that will benefit the world when we find the solutions to them, and we are continuing to do that. We are finding new therapies, new diagnostics and new vaccines that will help a lot of people around the world.” Besides biosciences, SRI International’s research divisions include education, engineering and products and services. The nonprofit’s claims to fame include inventing the computer mouse and Siri, the first virtual personal assistant, which is used in iPhones. SRI spun off Siri Inc. in 2007 and sold it to Apple Inc. in 2010.
manager, Mount Jackson. Fauber has worked in local government for many years, including 24 years as the town manager of Strasburg and two years as Elkton’s town manager. (The Shenandoah Valley-Herald) Catherine C. Galvin returned as executive director of Shenandoah Area Agency on Aging (SAAA) in Front Royal. Galvin served in that role from 1992 to 2002 and
was most recently director of program development for the Harrisonburg Community Health Center. (ShenValleyNow.com) David Hoyt, named senior vice president, strategic accounts executive, at Bridgewater-based Dynamic Aviation. Hoyt was Dynamic Aviation’s vice president for business development, director of sales and marketing, and marketing manager. (VirginiaBusiness.com)
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Heathsville firm helping to revive manufacturing jobs by Susan Smigielski Acker
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eathsville-based Hickory Ground Solutions LLC is helping Southern Virginia and East Tennessee create manufacturing jobs, using lessons learned in war-torn places like Iraq and Afghanistan. The American Indianowned consulting firm also is working with Central Oklahoma’s oil industry leaders to find ways to resume normal production more quickly after a natural disaster. On all three contracts, Hickory Ground Solutions is teaming with another consulting firm, Supply Chain Visions LLC, which has operations in Arlington County and the Boston area. The projects are part of the Small Business Administration’s Investing in Manufacturing Communities Partnership, which aims to promote a resurgence in manufacturing jobs in economically hard-hit regions. Hickory Ground Solutions and Supply Chain Visions formed a joint venture, SEE Alliance, in May. The firms use expertise that their leaders, — Bart Morrison of Hickory Ground Solutions and Steve Geary of Supply Chain Visions — gained in countries whose economies had been disrupted by conflict.
Graphic courtesy Hickory Ground Solutions
As a Department of Defense employee, for example, Morrison worked to re-establish a functioning business community in Iraq. Geary, meanwhile, helped create Defense supply chains in Iraq and Afghanistan, “Our understanding of supply chain requirements provides the SBA with a team that can understand competing requirements and identify alignment opportunities,” he says. Under a $167,242 federal contract, the team will work with the Southside Virginia Planning District Commission to devise a plan for Mecklenburg, Brunswick and Halifax counties. “That area used to be a regional powerhouse in textiles, but with the passing of NAFTA in 2000, it no longer is,” Morrison says.
The team will analyze the area, looking for opportunities to attract new manufacturers. Another goal is to increase small-business participation in manufacturing and the supply chain. For East Tennessee, the problem is similar, except that, instead of textiles, the disrupted industry is coal mining. Once the area’s industrial king, coal has been knocked off the throne because of tougher federal regulations and increased U.S. production of natural gas. The SBA contract for that project is $167,969. The companies will identify area businesses that can help create manufacturing jobs and use local companies as suppliers. “Many times businesspeople overlook nearby areas and don’t know who has what to offer,” Morrison says. In Central Oklahoma, the goal of a $188,561 contract is figuring how to decrease production downtime in the oil industry after a natural disaster. “This area gets hit with a lot of tornadoes. It can be devastating,” Morrison says. A May tornado in Moore, Okla., near Oklahoma City, had peak winds estimated at 210 mph, killing 23 people and injuring 377 others.
People
the Virginia real estate leader. (VirginiaBusiness.com)
Accounting firm Dixon Hughes Goodman (DHG) created two positions for its Hampton Roads offices. Caron Crouse will lead the Norfolk and Virginia Beach offices as office managing partner. Joel Flax will serve as
Retired U.S. Navy SEAL Dave M. Cooper, named the president of the Virginia Beach-based Navy SEAL Foundation. Cooper is one of only 12 SEALs to hold the position of command master chief at Naval Special Warfare Development Group. (VirginiaBusiness.com)
John F. Reinhart will become executive director and CEO of the Virginia Port Authority beginning in February. He is currently CEO of Norfolkbased Maersk Line Ltd. (VirginiaBusiness.com)
Robert W. Manly, Smithfield Foods’ CFO, has been promoted to executive vice president and chief synergy
John L. Skeans, named vice president and chief financial officer at Chesapeake Regional Medical Center.
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officer. (VirginiaBusiness.com)
Skeans was executive vice president and chief financial officer at St. Anthony’s Medical Center in St. Louis. (VirginiaBusiness.com) Byron Woodard, named senior vice president and chief marketing officer, Ferguson, Newport News. Woodard was the vice president of global marketing at McGraw Hill Financial-Platts. (News release)
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Eastern Virginia For the Record The Breeden Co.’s Cambria at Cornerstone has won a national housing award. The 420-unit apartment community in Virginia Beach is the first-ever recipient of the “Best Lifestyle Programming” award for a multifamily community award. It is a new category in the 2013 NAHB Multifamily Pillars of the Industry Awards given by the National Association of Home Builders. The Breeden Co. is a Virginia Beach-based multifamily and residential developer. (News release) Chelsea Business Association was formed in September to focus attention on branding and redeveloping the commercial district south of West Ghent in Norfolk. Twenty people representing 16 businesses are planning area events to promote the neighborhood. This district includes the Birch Bar, the new Smartmouth Brewing Co., Tortilla West and the New Leaf Florist, among other businesses. (TidewaterBiz.com) Rieder Holdings, a New York real estate investment and management firm looking to expand its presence in Hampton Roads, has purchased the 224-unit Greenwich Village Apartments in Virginia Beach for $36.2 million, or about $162,000 per unit. The sellers were Harmony Investments Inc. and Spy Rock Development. Spy Rock, based in Richmond, is a regional developer and owner of several multifamily communities in Virginia. Harmony Investments in Virginia Beach has partnered with Spy Rock to develop multifamily properties in Hampton Roads. (VirginiaBusiness.com) Three Hampton Roads companies are among four in Virginia named to a list of the nation’s 100 best small publicly traded companies compiled by Forbes magazine. The companies are Toano-based Lumber Liquidators, Norfolk-based Portfolio Recovery Associates, Sterling-based Neustar and Hampton-based Measurement Specialties. Lumber Liquidators was ranked 17th, and Portfolio Recovery Associates was No. 18. Neustar is 57th on the Forbes list. Measurement Specialties ranked No. 76. (VirginiaBusiness.com) Gov. Bob McDonnell says a $2.1 billion tunnel project in Hampton Roads will proceed in light of a Virginia Supreme Court ruling that allows tolls to pay for the work. In May, a lower court judge ruled unconstitutional an agreement between the state and a private company to use tolls to pay to expand the Midtown Tunnel between Norfolk and Portsmouth, refurbish the Downtown Tunnel between the two cities, and extend a connecting expressway between the tunnels. (Richmond TimesDispatch)
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Northern Virginia ggiiin inia nia ni n ia ia For the Record Cvent, an expanding event management solutions company, is shifting its headquarters to a bigger space in Fairfax County. The move means the county will retain 451 local jobs and gain another 400 during the next three years. Cvent, which has operated in Virginia since 1999, will move into SAIC’s former headquarters building in Tysons Corner. Cvent’s current headquarters is in the same area, on Greensboro Drive in McLean. (VirginiaBusiness.com) Three medical facilities in King George County closed: the Gateway Medical Urgent Care center, King George Pediatrics and King George Medical Center. The facilities were owned by Dantra Healthcare Inc., which announced in October it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in order to restructure financially and develop a repayment plan for its creditors. (Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star) Fairfax-based George Mason University will be home to a teaching center starting next summer. The Virginia Center for Excellence in Teaching will admit 100 teachers per year and guide them on topics such as instruction, education policy and leadership. Teachers must hold a five-year renewable Virginia license, be employed by a Virginia school division, have a minimum of five years of successful teaching experience and have a consistent record of effective instruction and demonstrated leadership ability. (VirginiaBusiness.com) Inova Health Care Services, a notfor-profit health-care system in Northern Virginia, has purchased an 8.7-acre tract of land and plans to build a Healthplex facility in Dulles. It will offer 24-hour health care, including physician offices and diagnostic imaging. The company that sold the land, Akridge and Soave Enterprises, said that the Healthplex will be an integral part of a larger mixed-use development, planned around multimodal transit opportunities that future adjacent Metrorail stations will create. The purchase price was not disclosed. (VirginiaBusiness.com) Loudoun County has emerged as one of the biggest data center hubs in the country. Riding the tremendous growth in cloud computing, the area around Ashburn now rivals Silicon Valley, the New York suburbs and the Dallas area in data storage prowess. There are more than 9 million square feet of data centers in Northern Virginia, including 5 million square feet in Loudoun County. Another 3 million square feet are planned or being developed in Loudoun. (The Washington Post)
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DECEMBER 2013
Auto service aims to update mechanic’s toolbox by Veronica Garabelli
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Northern Virginiabased business is helping auto repair shops plug into hybrid electric vehicles. “There’s a huge disconnect in training and information available on how to diagnose and maintain hybrid vehicles. Dealers are not teaching it,” says Matt Curry, CEO of The Hybrid Shop and the former owner of Sterlingbased Curry’s Auto Service. Curry now is focused on developing franchises for The Hybrid Shop after selling Curry’s Auto Service to Rochester, N.Y.-based Monro Muffler Brake Inc. in August. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but total annual sales for Curry’s Auto Service’s 10 locations were about $18 million. “The main reason why The Hybrid Shop was born was to put people in business to be able to maintain and repair everything in a hybrid vehicle,” Curry says. One of The Hybrid Shop’s signature services is its battery pack conditioning, which the company says can restore a hybrid vehicle’s battery up to 95 percent of its original performance. Customers save money because they don’t have to replace their cars’ batteries, which can cost
People Brad Boland, named president for 2014 of the Virginia Association of Realtors. Boland is a managing broker and owner at Keller Williams in Dulles. (VirginiaBusiness.com) The Fredericksburg Main Street Initiative selected the following people to its board of directors: Sue Bridi, Andi Gabler, Wilson Greenlaw Jr., Dolores “D.D.” Lecky, Dave Minckler, Scarlett
The Hybrid Shop currently has 10 locations in the U.S., two of which are in Virginia.
Photo courtesy The Hybrid Shop
$4,000 to $4,500 each. Restoring the battery also is more environmentally friendly than getting a new one, Curry says. The conditioning process can improve a vehicle’s gas mileage up to 35 percent and restore a car’s performance, horsepower and torque, he explains. “There’s no company out there that is operating the training and equipment that allows people to diagnose the car and condition the battery like we do,” Curry says. Businesses pay $60,000 each for a Hybrid Shop franchise and receive training, tools, marketing materials, a website and blog, Curry
Pons and Jeff Scott. (Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star) Maureen Del Duca, named vice president and deputy general counsel, litigation and investigations, Northrop Grumman, Falls Church. Del Duca was senior vice president and deputy general counsel, litigation, and chief ethics and compliance officer at AOL. (VirginiaBusiness.com) Glen Bolger and Julie Dime of Alexandria, named
says. Franchisees also pay The Hybrid Shop a flat fee of $125 every time they use its Battery Discharge Unit. The Hybrid Shop currently has 10 locations in the U.S., two of which are in Virginia. Curry says The Hybrid Shop expects to add three more stores in the Washington, D.C. , area by next March through a deal with Monro. According to Automotive Research and Design LLC — a Hybrid Shop partner— slightly more than 2.7 million hybrid vehicles were registered in the U.S. as of June 30. Virginia is home to more than 100,000 registered hybrid vehicles.
to the Mount Vernon Board of Visitors. Bolger is a survey researcher for Public Opinion Strategies, and Dime is a partner at Principle Advantage Ltd. (News release) Jason Frankl, appointed to board of directors, Santeon, Reston. Frankl will serve as independent director and chairman of the compensation committee. He is a senior managing director in FTI Consulting’s forensic and litigation consulting segment. (News release)
S. Gulu Gambhir, named chief technology officer at Reston-based Leidos. Gambhir was acting corporate chief technology officer and CTO of the company’s national security sector. He will retain his sector-level responsibilities. (VirginiaBusiness.com) Charles Harrington, chairman and CEO of Pasadena, Calif.-based Parsons Corp., appointed to the board of directors of Arlington-based AES Corp. (VirginiaBusiness.com)
ON THE WEB: Complete list of For the Record and People at www.VirginiaBusiness.com
RegionalView
Williams to step down at Star Scientific
Central Virginiaa advantage of opportunities in
by Robert Powell
J
onnie Williams Sr., the executive whose gifts and loans to Virginia’s first family sparked a federal investigation of Gov. Bob McDonnell, plans to step down as head of Glen Allenbased Star Scientific Inc. At the end of December, Williams will resign as CEO of the company he founded as a discount cigarette maker in 1990. The move is part of an overhaul designed to focus the company on the development of pharmaceuticals, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Williams will stay on for one year as a nonexecutive employee. Williams became a central figure in a Justice Department probe of McDonnell after Williams showered the governor’s family with more than $160,000 in loans and gifts. Star has said it does not expect to be prosecuted in that investigation or a separate probe into the company’s securities transactions. The company’s shakeup, recommended by the current senior management and board of directors, would include new top executives, a virtually new board, a name change and the potential shift of some research and administrative responsibilities
People Danny TK Avula and Josie Webster of Richmond, named to the state Board of Social Services. Avula is a physician and deputy director at Richmond City Health District. Webster is vice president of the Virginia Council for Private Education. (News release) Andreas Dressler will serve as director of State of Virginia, Europe, for the Richmondbased Virginia Economic Development Partnership. Dressler is managing director
Jonnie Williams Sr. AP file photo
to Sarasota, Fla., where the new CEO resides. Company shareholders will vote on proposals authorizing many of the changes at its annual meeting on Dec. 27 in Washington, D.C. The new CEO would be Dr. Michael J. Mullan, the CEO and president of The Roskamp Institute in Sarasota. The organization has conducted research on the anti-inflammatory effects of anatabine, an alkaloid found in trace amounts in tobacco and other plants. A synthetic version of anatabine is used in Star’s Anatabloc dietary supplement, its primary product. An affiliate of Roskamp receives a 5 percent royalty on Anatabloc sales, $342,000 during the first nine months of 2013, according to the SEC filings. The filings said the changes were needed to take
of Terrain Consulting in Berlin. (News release) L. Michael Gracik Jr. will become the new managing partner of the Richmond accounting firm Keiter on Jan. 1. He will succeed retiring managing partner Lewis O. Hall, who has served in the role for 15 years. Gracik joined Keiter as a partner and head of its tax department in 1991. (VirginiaBusiness.com)
ON THE WEB: Complete list of For the Record and People at www.VirginiaBusiness.com
the pharmaceutical industry, including the development of new products approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Star, which has been losing money for more than a decade, would change its name to Rock Creek Pharmaceuticals Inc., the name of a Massachusetts-based Star subsidiary that makes its dietary supplement and cosmetic products. Williams will continue to be paid $1 a month, the compensation he set for himself this year. He previously was paid a base salary of $1 million a year. Also stepping down is longtime Star president and COO Paul L. Perito. Like Williams, he will stay for one year as vice president and senior counsel, legal and regulatory affairs. He would be replaced by Dr. Christopher C. Chapman, a member of the board of directors and the only one being re-nominated to the six-person board at the annual meeting. Chapman is chairman and CEO of Chapman Pharmaceutical Consulting Inc. and chairman of the Chapman Pharmaceutical Health Foundation.
Julie H. Gustavsson, named chief operating officer, Keiter, Richmond. Gustavsson joined Keiter in 2005 and served in IT leadership positions before becoming the firm’s COO. (News release) Javaid Siddiqi named Virginia’s secretary of education. Siddiqi was deputy secretary of education. In addition, Bryan Rhode was named Virginia’s secretary of public safety. He was deputy secre-
tary of public safety. (News release) Two professors from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond will travel abroad next spring on Fulbright grants. Jeff South, an associate professor in the School of Mass Communications, will teach at Northeast Normal University in Changchun, China, and Shawn Utsey, professor of counseling psychology in the Department of Psychology, will travel to South Africa to conduct an oral history project. (News release)
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For the Record Altria Group Inc. is giving the Science Museum of Virginia $1 million to expand its after-school learning program aimed at middle school students. The gift from the Henrico County-based company will help the museum advance its statewide outreach strategy to engage students in hands-on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) learning. (Richmond Times-Dispatch) The cable television network AMC is filming a Colonial-era spy series in Richmond that’s expected to have an economic impact of $45 million per season. The show, tentatively titled “Turn,” is based on the nonfiction book “Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring” by Alexander Rose. The story is centered on a band of young soldiers and civilians who were part of a spy ring that assisted George Washington and helped America to win the Revolutionary War. The show will premiere on AMC in 2014. (VirginiaBusiness.com) Henrico County-based technology consulting firm CapTech opened a delivery center at its local office that could result in the company adding up to 100 jobs over 18 months. CapTech has about 430 employees now, including about 280 in Richmond. Sandy Williamson, the company’s chief executive officer, said it plans to hire at least an additional 50 people this year and continue growing next year. Williamson said the company expects to add jobs mainly in technical fields such as engineering, data analysis and project management. (Richmond Times-Dispatch) MeadWestvaco, a Richmond-based packaging giant, has signed a deal to sell all of its timberland — 501,000 acres in Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia — for $934 million in cash and financing. About 125,000 acres are in Virginia. Plum Creek Timber Co. Inc., a timber real estate investment trust based in Seattle, will buy the forestland and associated wind and mineral assets. (Richmond Times-Dispatch) Richmond-based leaf tobacco company Universal Corp. is expanding in Africa. The largest of the projects is in Mozambique, where the company will expand tobacco production and processing capabilities. The cost of the project is expected to run between $40 million and $45 million during the next two years. A new processing line is scheduled to begin operation next September. Other African projects involve efficiency improvements and equipment enhancements at facilities in Tanzania and Malawi. (VirginiaBusiness.com)
VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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2013 Virginia Business Person of the Year
Tonya Mallory
Chief executive officer Health Diagnostic Laboratory, Richmond
2013 Virginia Business Person of the Year 20
DECEMBER 2013
Game changer M ll r wants Mallory nt tto revolutionize the practice of medicine in the U.S.
he day Tonya Mallory closed on h the t capital for Health Diagnostic Laboratory Inc., she bounced an $11 check for a T-shirt order to one of her sons’ schools. “We were down to zero. I was going to apply at Wal-Mart the very was actually goi next weekend. That’s how close to nothing we had,” recalls HD HDL’s CEO. “I was going to stock at Wal-Mart on [midnight shifts] so I could keep trying the company going during the day.” t ying to get th tr SShee and her husband of 23 years, Scott, Sh already had spent much of their savings for his late mother during a termicaring fo nal illness. So there wasn’t a reserve to dip into for her business. “We essentially bet the farm,” Mallory says. “We agreed that we would cash out our 401(k) accounts, the kids’ college accounts, and we second-mortgaged the house.” Mallory estimates that she pitched her vision of a new type of medical laboratory corporation to about 500 investors for about a year before landing a $4 million angel investment from Tipton Golias, the founder and president of Texas-based Helena Laboratories. “Driven” is how most people describe Mallory. It’s a pretty apt characterization of the Virginia Business 2013 Business Person of the Year. While in college and graduate school, Mallory worked full time and volunteered 12 hours every Sunday for her local rescue squad. Her drive, a vision to create a new model for treating chronic disease and the impressive ramp-up of her RichmondPhoto by Clement Britt
by Richard Foster
based company — which spurred one of the biggest expansions ever in the city’s biotech park — were all reasons why the magazine’s editors selected Mallory as its sixth annual winner. HDL co-founder Joe McConnell, the director of cardiovascular laboratory medicine at the Mayo Clinic before joining HDL, describes Mallory “as one of the most amazing people that you’ll meet. I don’t think she ever sleeps or if she does, she sleeps very little … At the same time, she cares about people, but she doesn’t let people get in her way when she wants to do things. She’s got a vision and a plan. HDL wouldn’t be where it is today without Tonya.” Mallory, 48, founded HDL in the summer of 2009. Since then, it has grown from a kitchen-table business plan to a corporation earning more than $420 million in annual revenue, employing 750 people, processing 4,000 lab samples and running more than 60,000 lab tests each day. HDL has driven nearconstant construction at its home in downtown Richmond’s Virginia BioTechnology Research Park, where a $68.5 million expansion soon will triple the company’s footprint to 280,000 square feet. Last year Mallory received the Ernst & Young National Entrepreneur of the Year award in the Emerging Company category. One of the country’s most prestigious business awards for entrepreneurs, it recognizes leaders who demonstrate innovation, financial success and personal commitment as they build their businesses. HDL is the largest cardiovascular and diabetes testing lab of its type in the world. It hit its five-year goal in its first 10 months of business. The company hires a person a day on average; in some months it adds as many as 50 workers.
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VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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2013 Virginia Business Person of the Year Partnerships, including one with the Washington Redskins, are helping to boost growth.
Partnerships are fueling some of the growth. HDL is the official health and wellness partner of the Washington Redskins. Under the arrangement, HDL provides health testing and consulting services for the Redskins organization and works with the team to promote diabetes awareness. The sponsorship also grants HDL some branding promotion at the Redskins’ home stadium in Landover, Md., and its new training camp in Richmond. HDL also is known for its corporate largesse. It gave $2.2 million to the Science Museum of Virginia (the largest corporate gift in the museum’s history) and donated $4 million to the athletics department at Virginia Commonwealth University, Mallory’s alma mater. A huge fan of VCU Rams basketball, Mallory keeps a photo of herself with men’s coach Shaka Smart in her office. HDL’s primary revenue stream comes from a panel of comprehensive lab tests that allow early detection of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome and fatty liver disease. In October, HDL acquired the assets of a British company that produces a blood test for early detection of lung cancer. “Tonya is an absolute visionary,” 22
DECEMBER 2013
says Dr. Shaiv Kapadia, a cardiologist who is chief of staff at Bon Secours St. Francis Hospital. HDL’s stoplight-coded tests are easy to review for patients and physicians. And compared with HDL’s tests, he says, “conventional cholesterol testing probably misses almost half of the folks who are at risk for cardiovascular disease.” Mallory, however, considers HDL a
health management company, not just a laboratory. HDL offers patients free health coaching services, including smoking cessation, dietary and behavioral change, in an effort to improve patient health and prevent heart attacks and diabetes. Kapadia calls the health coach program “genius” and says that — combined with HDL’s testing — it has been “a very powerful” tool for reducing cardiac events in his cardiology practice. HDL also has begun offering its early detection and health coaching services as a paid service to private companies so corporations can improve employees’ health and keep insurance costs down. So far, HDL’s clients include Markel Corp. and Bon Secours Richmond Health System in addition to a pilot program with the state government. Tests are confidential and not shared with the employer, says HDL Marketing Program Manager Jeff Kelley. The employer sees aggregate data about employee health “in order to implement initiatives to move employees, on the whole, from red to green. Test results are used to help lower overall claims/healthcare costs and provide a tool for employees to help them manage their health.” An independent study published in September in the health-care journal Population Health Management found that HDL’s testing and coaching reduced patients’ health-care costs by an average 23 percent over a two-year period and also improved patients’ lipid profiles.
HDL’s main source of revenue comes from its laboratory tests.
Photo credit
2013 Virginia Business Person of the Year “HDL is a game changer,” says Dr. Sam Fillingane, a Mississippi physician who specializes in cardiovascular risk reduction. Previously, the kind of testing that HDL offers wasn’t covered by insurance and only wealthy patients could afford the out-of-pocket expenses, he adds. (HDL’s business model is predicated on accepting whatever insurance companies will pay for tests; patients pay only co-pays or deductibles.) Plus, physicians would have to send tests to multiple labs because no one lab offered all the specialized tests that could be done by HDL. HDL’s array of tests gives physicians ample warnings to conduct behavioral and drug interventions that could virtually eliminate heart disease and Type 2 diabetes, says Fillingane, who has worked as an educational consultant for HDL. Insurance companies and health-care corporations are skeptical about spending money for prevention up front, he notes, but the tests cost far less, for example, than heart bypass surgery, which can run more than $100,000. An average primary-care practice might have dozens of patients with cardiac events each year, but through using advanced biomarker testing and health coaching, “it is very rare for a heart attack to occur in my patient population, which is high risk,” he says. His patients routinely see a regression of arterial plaque buildup. “Some people think that this approach is too expensive,” says Fillingane, “but I say it’s too expensive not to take this approach. I personally think if we beat cardiovascular disease in the United States it’s going to be through efforts like that of Health Diagnostic Laboratory.” Jeffrey Gallagher, executive director of the Virginia Biotechnology Association, says Mallory is an inspiration to others in the industry. Biotech entrepreneurs in Virginia routinely talk about wanting to be “the next Tonya,” he says. “She’s been a terrific champion of research and commercialization of innovation and entrepreneurship. … She’s just been an inspiration to us all. … This is a very difficult way of life, to do the research that might not have any friction for years or to start companies or products that are going to have a 10- to 15-year path to get to the marketplace, and I can’t underscore strongly enough how … [HDL’s success] Photos courtesy Health Diagnostic Laboratory Inc.
fuels them and keeps people going.” Robert Skunda, CEO of Richmond’s biotech park and a former state secretary of commerce and trade, calls the company’s growth “astounding.” He has received “quizzical” questions about it from business leaders who wonder how long HDL can sustain such rapid growth. He thinks HDL’s growth will level off eventually, but that HDL is a “bona fide, homegrown success.” McConnell, HDL’s co-founder, says Mallory “has a philosophy that’s sometimes scary to me: That is, leap and the net will appear. It’s going to be down there. You’ve got to take that leap and it will appear. Sometimes I worry, but there’s always been a net. We’ve always managed to build that net … and if we have to build the net while we’re falling, that’s good, too, because it happened. It’s really been an exciting time, and Tonya pushes the envelope all the way.” Her early years Tonya Mallory grew up in the rural Doswell area of Hanover County and graduated from Patrick Henry High
School. Her father was a welder for Philip Morris; her mother worked as an accountant clerk for Bear Island Paper Co. At age 13, she doctored a job permit from her pediatrician to say that she was 18 years old so she could work in the restaurant kitchen at the Kings Quarters, a hotel connected to Kings Dominion theme park. By the time she was actually 18, she was managing the restaurant. She attended Virginia Commonwealth University, paying her way through school by working full time at restaurants. On Sundays, she volunteered 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. for her local rescue squad. She received her undergraduate degree in biology and chemistry in 1988 and went on to earn a master’s degree in forensic science a year and a half later. “I was going to graduate school from noon until 10 p.m. and working from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. at what is now LabCorp but was then Hoffmann-La Roche Laboratories. I was sleeping about 8 hours a week,” she recalls, laughing. “Believe it or not, I graduated with a 3.9 average or something like that.” Mallory had wanted to pursue a career
Congratulations to the 2013 National Philanthropy Day Honorees Macon and Joan Brock Outstanding Philanthropists Eastern Virginia Medical School Outstanding Non-Profit in Fundraising Betty Harmon Edwards Outstanding Volunteer Fundraiser Ferguson Enterprises Outstanding Corporate Philanthropist KID2KID at St. Mary’s Home Outstanding Youth in Philanthropy Landmark Foundation Outstanding Foundation Catherine “Kitty” Schaum Outstanding Fundraising Professional
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VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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2013 Virginia Business Person of the Year in medicine but was concerned that the managed-care environment would make it difficult for her to pay back school loans. So she decided to become a DNA fingerprint examiner for the state forensics lab. (She’s a fan of best-selling mystery novelist Patricia Cornwell, who was working at the state medical examiner’s office when Mallory was taking classes at the forensic lab in graduate school: “She was working at the lab … I was a student; I was a nobody but [I would see her] in the halls.”) Due to budget cuts at the time, the forensics lab wasn’t a good prospect, so Mallory took what she thought would be a temporary position at Richmond-based Wako Chemicals USA, a Japanese manufacturer that produced chemicals and reagents used in laboratory testing. She wound up working there for more than 17 years. Put in charge of Wako’s chemical diagnostic division, Mallory says she built its annual revenues from about $4,800 to $21 million. “I figured out what the market needed,” she explains, and created marketing materials, pursued FDA approvals and allowed larger companies
24
DECEMBER 2013
Tonya with her sister, Lisa Dyson, (left) who is diabetic and suffered two heart attacks.
to rebrand and resell Wako’s chemicals. “In a Japanese company, it’s very common for everyone to wear many hats. Mallory says. “If you take those 17 years of experience, it’s probably equivalent in an American company to 40 or 50 years.” Then conversant in Japanese, Mallory was accustomed to company managers in Japan telling her that goals she set
and changes she proposed were impossible. “Of course I loved that, and I had to prove them wrong.” The department had been in the red for more than 10 years before Mallory took it over, says Hiroshi Shima, her former boss at Wako. “What she did was to set goals, motivate her staff members toward them and take aggressive actions to increase sales,” he recalls. “She has unsurpassed physical and mental toughness as well as a strong will with which she carries out whatever she is required to do. Moreover, she has ample and broad knowledge about the industry and has outstanding ability to absorb new knowledge. Yet she is always kind to whoever is in need of help.” For example, Shima says, “One of our employees had chemotherapy after her breast cancer surgery and showed up to work wearing a cap. Next day, all women in the office started wearing a cap. That turned out to be Tonya’s idea.” After Shima was transferred back to Japan in 2004, the company’s new, more traditional Japanese leadership told Mallory flatly that because she was
Photo courtesy Health Diagnostic Laboratory Inc.
2013 Virginia Business Person of the Year a woman and below age 50, she would not advance farther in the company, she says. When her mother-in-law was dying, the company denied her requests to work at home. Mallory instead took vacation leave to care for her mother-in-law, who died 11 days later. The incident influences Mallory’s attitudes toward her employees at HDL, who have flexible schedules, no time clocks and generous leave. Less than a year later, G. Russell Warnick — another HDL co-founding partner who was then vice president of laboratory operations and chief scientific officer at San Francisco-based Berkeley HeartLab — recruited Mallory to build a second Berkeley lab in Richmond. From 2005 to 2008 Mallory commuted back and forth from Richmond to San Francisco, but when Berkeley was suddenly acquired by Celera Corp., the Richmond lab project was killed. Mallory and Warnick both left, unhappy with the conservative management of Celera, which Warnick says discouraged innovation and entrepreneurial attitudes. At that point, Mallory began writing the business plan for HDL. Down-to-earth and quick to laugh, Mallory is an iconoclast who is likely to show up at business meetings wearing jeans and Birkenstock sandals. She’s a “Bazinga” T-shirt-owning, “Big Bang Theory” fan who has a toy figure of über-geek Dr. Sheldon Cooper perched above her office computer monitor. An open book, she volunteers that she loves Stella Artois beer and likes fishing in the pond behind her family’s Goochland County home. Besides being a busy executive, she’s the mother of two sons, Jace, 15, a student at Richmond’s Benedictine College Preparatory school, and Adam, 20, a VCU exercise science major who works at HDL as a personal trainer in the employee gym. Mallory also is creative outside her business innovations: She enjoys painting abstract portraits, and several of them decorate the walls at HDL. “When my stress goes up, the paintings start multiplying,” she says. Asked whether she would ever consider taking the company public, Mallory says she’ll never say never, but she doesn’t see it happening anytime soon because HDL hasn’t reached its goal. That goal is nothing short of revolutionizing the way American medicine is practiced.
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2013 Virginia Business Person of the Year When Mallory’s mother-in-law became ill with leukemia, it took a year before a doctor did a test that revealed that she had a fatal kidney disease. “I went back to her primary-care physician and asked, ‘How come you didn’t have her pee in a cup the day she walked in the doctor’s office?’ and he said because insurance wouldn’t cover it. So I spent a year of my time chasing an answer that he could have had had he made a good clinical decision … regardless of what the insurance paid for or didn’t pay for.” Mallory encountered a similar prob-
lem in late 2009 when her older sister, a Type 1 diabetic, had her second undiagnosed heart attack in two weeks and passed out. In the emergency room, the doctor was ready to release her because her cardiac markers looked fine. But Mallory realized they had tested the heart muscle and didn’t look for a blockage. She threatened to report the doctor to the hospital administration if she didn’t refer her sister to a cardiologist for a stress test. It turned out that Mallory’s sister had 95 percent blockage in two arteries; four days later she underwent double bypass surgery.
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“It was the lack of understanding of the disease and the disease process,” Mallory says. “There’s no doubt in my mind that had she not gone down to that stress lab that she would have died.” Mallory attributes HDL’s success to a “perfect storm” of conflating factors: Sedentary lifestyles and poor diets have led to an obesity epidemic, which in turn has led to high rates of Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Plus, some patients feel like they don’t get enough time with their primary doctors to discuss medical problems. HDL’s easy-to-understand, comprehensive tests “empower the patient and the physician,” she says. Still, Mallory acknowledges she’s a long way from reaching her ultimate goal. Depending on the source, there are an estimated 208,000 to 352,000 primary care physicians in the United States. About 18,000 of those physicians use HDL’s tests and only 15,000 have received advanced training on reading the tests. “It’s really important for physicians to be armed with information and to make clinical decisions that they believe in. So a lot of our business model is built on that,” Mallory says. “If you look at the real value of lab tests, they’re 3 to 5 percent of the cost to the health-care system, but they control 70 percent of the decisions. It doesn’t matter what lab test you do. Do them all — they’re so cheap — and make very good clinical decisions.” Of all the perks that have come with being the CEO of a fast-growing, respected corporation, Mallory says the most valuable to her is having a say. “I didn’t have a voice before,” she says. “And no one’s ever told me I’m short on words.” She’s used that voice to help direct the biotech park and to innovate at VCU, offering direction to VCU’s School of Business and pumping up the university’s clinical chemistry program. She’s used it to support local and national nonprofits fighting obesity and promoting health prevention. More importantly, she wants the entire medical community to hear her. “I started HDL in order to impact medicine,” Mallory says. “I definitely understood that medicine had gotten to a place in the United States where it was quite reactionary, and we want to be a catalyst to change that.”
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Business Trends: Business Law
Family feud Is The Disthene Group settlement a cautionary tale for closely held companies? As a child, Curtis Colgate played with his cousins on the lawn of the Cavalier Hotel, which was sold as part of a legal settlement that awarded him $25 million.
by Paula C. Squires
A
t 34, Curtis Dixon Colgate is a multimillionaire. Yet his newfound riches came at a high personal cost. “It’s still bittersweet,” he says of a legal settlement that granted him $25 million. “It’s eight years that’s sundered my family.” Colgate’s long battle against The Disthene Group Inc., a Dillwyn-based holding company that owns the largest kyanite mine in the world, came to an end in August when both sides signed off on a $77 million agreement. The litigation pitted Colgate’s family members, who owned 42 percent of the company’s Class B, nonvoting shares, against their relatives: Gene Dixon Jr., Disthene’s president and chairman of the board (and Colgate’s uncle); and his son, Guy B. Dixon, president of the Kyanite Mining Corp. (Colgate’s cousin). The company’s top executives, they own all 28
DECEMBER 2013
the Class A voting shares and, together with relatives and partnerships, more than 45 percent of the nonvoting shares. The high-stakes fight focused on the rights of minority shareholders. Lawyers from LeClairRyan, who represented Colgate’s family, hail the settlement as a “landmark” victory. “The plight of the minority shareholders is that they’re basically captive investors,” says attorney John H. Craddock Jr. “There’s no market for their stock. They’ve got no way to get out of their investment. They have no vote in what’s going on. When you’re in a position like that, it’s very easy to take advantage of the shareholder, and that’s what they did.” Yet some businesspeople say the outcome makes Virginia less friendly to companies. After all, a circuit judge recommended Disthene’s dissolution — the
death penalty for any business. In his first public comment on the case, Guy Dixon told Virginia Business in an email, “If a business like ours can be dissolved by the court … companies will clearly have to consider whether the decisions they make could be retroactively construed as oppressive, even though they are made in the company’s best interests and even though hindsight clearly demonstrates that the company benefitted from those decisions. That’s an incredibly disruptive and chilling thought ...” The narrative behind the Disthene case sounds like something out of a legal thriller: There was a deathbed promise, accusations of greed and half-truths and the possibility of a court-ordered dissolution of a profitable, $200 million company owned by the family for four generations. Photo by Mark Rhodes
Business Law Besides the Kyanite Mining Corp., Disthene owned 28,000 acres of land and the historic Cavalier Hotel in Virginia Beach. As part of the settlement, the Cavalier was sold in July for $35.7 million. Guy Dixon The proceeds helped Disthene buy out minority shareholders’ stock. The rest of the money, says Guy Dixon, came from internal savings, the liquidation of other company assets and loans against the mine and real estate holdings. The largest payouts went to Curtis and his 49-year-old half-sister, Sharon Marie Newcomb, who also received $25 million. Curtis’ father, Marion J. “Boyd” Colgate Sr., held custodial shares and says he received a smaller amount, which he gave to his children. There were a few other shareholders who were paid a total of $7 million. The remainder of the settlement — nearly $20 million — went to LeClairRyan for legal fees. The settlement allows the Dixons to keep their land and retain control over the lucrative Kyanite Mining Corp. Kyanite is a heat-resistant element used in everything from spark plugs to space shuttle tiles. The mine is Buckingham County’s largest private employer with about 130 workers. Guy Dixon says the company and his family are “relieved” to have the suit behind them. “For while settling in this manner and under these terms is not the outcome we feel was justified, nor the path that we would have freely chosen, we do feel that it was in everybody’s best interests given the circuit court’s decision.” Judge Roush’s opinion Dixon was referring to a blistering, 41-page opinion by Fairfax Circuit Court Judge Jane Marum Roush, which preceded the settlement. Her ruling on Aug. 30, 2012, followed a trial in Buckingham on allegations in a lawsuit initially filed by Curtis, Sharon and Boyd in 2010. They said the Dixons engaged in a pattern of “oppressive and fraudulent conduct,” such as slashing the price of dividends, to retaliate against them for filing an earlier suit in 2005. That litigation, settled in 2007, alleged improprieties in Gene’s handling of a family trust that included shares of Photo by Mark Rhodes
stock intended for Curtis and Sharon. The Buckingham trial, which lasted 14 days, included more than 30 witnesses and 1,420 exhibits. After it was over, Roush ruled in favor of the plaintiffs’
The judge cited several examples of evidence of misuse of corporate assets. There was cash compensation of $1.2 million for Gene and $560,800 for Guy in 2011, amounts not set by Disthene’s board, that
The LeClairRyan legal team of Michele Burke, John Craddock, center, and Thomas Wolf says the settlement is a victory for the rights of minority shareholders.
request to dissolve Disthene. Although a drastic remedy, the judge said the move was merited because of “longstanding and ongoing oppression of minority shareholders as well as waste and misapplication of corporate assets.” Roush concluded that Gene and Guy Dixon “were motivated not by the best interests of the corporation but by their personal best interests.” She ruled further that their actions were not protected by Virginia’s business judgment rule. While it shields directors from personal liability for decisions made on behalf of a corporation, the doctrine did not apply, she said, “because Disthene’s board of directors did not act as a board and make informed decisions. To the extent it had any involvement in the decisions, the board merely bent to Gene’s ironhanded will and rubberstamped his decisions.” www.VirginiaBusiness.com
she found “excessive” when compared with the compensation of other mining executives. Roush also noted the use of a corporate beach house owned by the Cavalier Hotel for no rent or a nominal fee, use of the company’s plane for personal trips, meals at the Cavalier for a fraction of their costs and the preparation of personal tax returns of Dixon family members by Disthene accountants — with those costs sometimes charged to the company. The court also challenged the payment of $6.5 million by Disthene in premiums for life insurance policies owned by trusts established for the benefit of Gene’s children and grandchildren, calling the payments a “waste of corporate assets.” Roush agreed with the plaintiffs that slashing dividends, without a vote by the company’s board, was retaliatory behavior. “The plaintiffs have not been treated VIRGINIA BUSINESS
29
Business Law
Marion “Boyd” Colgate, 87, said the two sides tried to settle three or four times before coming to an agreement.
fairly by Disthene and its management,” Roush wrote in her opinion. “They have instead been treated as irksome interlopers, problems to be dealt with, preferably by squeezing them out at a below-market price, or slashing their dividends in the
hope of depriving them of the financial wherewithal to seek legal recourse.” At trial, the Dixons denied that dividends were cut to hurt minority shareholders. Court filings showed that Disthene had paid more than $36 million in
Tim Tharpe, vice president and manager for J.R. Tharpe Trucking Co. in Burkeville, worries that the settlement will set a bad legal precedent for familyowned businesses.
30
DECEMBER 2013
dividends since Gene Dixon, 70, became president in 1974, including more than $6 million paid to the plaintiffs since 1988. Since 2000, Disthene said it paid more than $8 million in dividends, or 70 percent of its profits. “No one likes to see their business decisions retroactively twisted and contorted to prop up what can be described as a conspiracy theory,” says Guy Dixon. “And it was difficult for me to read the circuit court’s opinion, which did not address any of the facts showing that there was never any intent to oppress anybody. For example, there was no mention of the fact that our decision to temporarily reduce dividends in favor of increased capital investment led directly to the record-breaking profitability of the last few years.” After the lower court’s ruling, the Disthene Group turned to the state Supreme Court, seeking a stay on the order to dissolve. In an appellant brief, the company’s legal team from Troutman Sanders argued, “the trial court abused its power and committed clear error in dissolving a corporation that has operated successfully for more than 70 years to the great benefit of its shareholders.” The Virginia Supreme Court initially rejected the petition. In April of this year, it accepted the appeal after a request for a rehearing. After the two sides signed off on the settlement in August, however, the court dismissed the appeal and vacated the dissolution in conjunction with Disthene’s buyout of the minority shareholders. Now that the legal dust has settled, observers are weighing in on the significance of the case. Michele K. Burke, a lead attorney who worked with the Colgate family on both lawsuits, says the decision represents one of the few clarifications of the business judgment rule. “It has national implications,” Burke said in a statement, “because the principles that minority shareholders have enforceable rights and that they must be treated fairly are generally applicable anywhere in the U.S.” Burke told Virginia Business that minority shareholders rarely sue because of the financial burden. “They have to risk all their money. They had a huge disadvantage in both cases,” she says. Boyd Colgate says the lawsuit cost Photo by Mark Rhodes
Business Law the plaintiffs several million dollars before LeClairRyan agreed to continue the case on a contingency basis. “We heavily leveraged our homes and all our properties,” he says. Those costs were paid back, he adds, with the settlement money. While Roush’s lower court ruling didn’t make any new law, the LeClairRyan team says the case sends a clear message. “This is a huge wake-up call to closely held businesses,” says Thomas M. Wolf, the attorney who managed the case for LeClairRyan. “Because there are so few reported cases of courts dissolving companies, there is the misperception that a controlling shareholder can run the company to benefit himself … This case should cause corporate officers, directors, controlling shareholders and legal advisers to look anew at the legal duties those roles carry — duties to the corporation and to its shareholders. The consequences for failing to do so can be severe.” Others, though, are troubled by the outcome. “The case has absolutely generated discussion in the small-business community,” says Tim Tharpe, vice president and manager for J.R. Tharpe Trucking Co. Inc. in Burkeville. “I do think the extreme ruling will have a negative effect on the decision making in a small family business regarding ownership and growth for future generations.” Tharpe’s company was one of 30 businesses that jointly hired an attorney and filed an amicus brief with the Virginia Supreme Court during the appeal process. His family-owned company has hauled Kyanite Mining Corp.’s sand to locations throughout Virginia, and he knows the Dixons. Even without that business relationship, he says, he would have supported the brief. Walton Moseley, president of Cape School Inc. in Buckingham, which provides continuing education and licensing, also supported the brief. “That decision flipped Virginia from being a business-friendly state to a business less-friendly state,” he says. “It says that the decisions you’re making to run your business can be second-guessed, and you could end up in court defending those decisions. A lot of businesses like us don’t have the resources that Disthene has and having to go to court could financially cripple us.” Photo by Mark Rhodes
Roush’s opinion is a lower court decision, “and it’s not binding on anybody,” notes Everett W. Gee III. He’s the general counsel for S&M Brands in Lunenburg County and the lawyer who filed the amicus brief on behalf of the small businesses. “But if any plaintiff comes along, this will be the case they will be waving around.” Litigation began in 2005 The first lawsuit filed against Disthene came two days before Christmas in December 2005. The seeds of the litigation, though, were planted long before that in the fourth-floor, Cape Henry Suite of the Cavalier Hotel on the Virginia Beach oceanfront. That’s where Curtis’ mother, Jeanne Dixon Colgate, spent her last days before dying of breast cancer at age 47 in 1988. In an interview with Virginia Business and in court testimony, Boyd Colgate said that, before his wife died, Jeanne told him that her younger brother, Gene, came to her room at The Cavalier and promised to protect the interests of her children: Sharon Newcomb, from her
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first marriage; and Curtis Colgate, her son with Boyd. Curtis was 9 at the time of her death, and Sharon was 24. For years, Boyd says, Gene seemed to be honoring that pledge. Then in 2005, Boyd began to ask questions about his late wife’s estate to confirm the number of shares held by Curtis and Sharon. That’s when the businessman from Chase City says he learned that some 30,000 shares of Class B stock held in a family trust — created for Gene and Jeanne’s mother, Mallie, upon the death of their father and of which Gene was the trustee — had been shifted to Gene Dixon’s three children. Curtis and Sharon, who were contingent beneficiaries, filed suit, alleging manipulation of the trust. The day before the suit was filed, Curtis called his cousin, Arch Dixon, another of Gene’s sons. Arch and his sister, Erica Dixon, were close to Curtis in age. He recalls that they used to spend summers together in Virginia Beach, playing hide and seek on the expansive lawn of The Cavalier. “Arch, Erica and I were inseparable. We would play around all day long,”
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Business Law he recalls. “Arch and I, we stayed close through the years. I felt I owed it to him to give him a call. I said, ‘Sharon and I have had to sue your dad over the trust.’ That’s really about the last conversation I ever had with him.” After a court hearing in 2007, the parties settled. About 11,600 shares were transferred from Gene’s side of the family to Sharon and Curtis, according to court documents. The next quarter after the suit was filed, Boyd says, Disthene’s dividend fell from what had consistently been about $4 to $6 a share to an alltime low of 85 cents. It stayed at that rate for 13 quarters, until 2010, “and that led to the second suit,” he says. Boyd, 87, who owns a furniture store, says he helped run the Cavalier Hotel for 10 years, leaving the property a year after his wife’s death. The hotel seems to tug at the heartstrings of Boyd and his son. After graduating from HampdenSydney College in 2001 with a degree in economics, Curtis says, he asked Gene if he could work at the Cavalier as a way of getting into the family business. He says Gene suggested that he “go work for
Bruce Thompson at the Hilton” (another hotel in Virginia Beach). As it turns out, a group formed by Thompson — a local developer who built the Hilton Virginia Beach Oceanfront — bought the Cavalier. It plans a $200 million renovation of it and another former Disthene property on the oceanfront. Looking back, Boyd had no idea the litigation would take so long. “It started out like an infant, and it just grew and grew.” He says he is comforted in knowing that the pledge to his late wife was made good. Plus, he hopes the case will be helpful to other minority shareholders. Boyd doesn’t feel sorry for the Dixons. After the June 2012 trial, he says, they had a chance to resolve the case for less than $70 million through mediation and for a better price than the $1,928 per share they ended up paying — a figure nearly 10 times more than what the Dixons had offered to pay for minority shares in the past. At one point during mediation, Boyd recalls, Disthene’s offer was “zero.” With the case behind him, Guy
CARTER’S GROVE
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DECEMBER 2013
Dixon doesn’t expect “direct, longlasting negative implications for our core business in terms of our sales, or our sales relations...” The people in Buckingham know the company and its long history, he adds. “These people — the people that really matter — are not fools, and I don’t expect them to change their perception of what kind of people we are (and what kind of company we are) based on the false allegations and accusations that were made in a lawsuit that all along was meant to force a cash out of the minority shareholders on terms they dictated.” Meanwhile, Curtis is trying to move on, too. He recently purchased a home in Virginia Beach with some of the settlement proceeds. At seven feet three inches, he stands out in a crowd. An avid fisherman, he is a member of Virginia’s Board of Game and Inland Fisheries where he recently was elected chairman. That’s a new challenge he relishes. Plus, he wants to rebuild some of the family relationships strained by the litigation. “I’m still drinking it all in,” he says. “It definitely reset my whole life.”
Carter’s 400-acre Carter’sGrove Grove(circa (circa1750-1755), 1750-1755), a 400-acre Virginia plantation with over a mile of frontage Virginia plantation with over a mile of frontage ononthe James River in southeastern James City the James River in southeastern James City County, mostimpresimpresCounty,isisone oneofofcolonial colonialAmerica’s America’s most sive examples of Georgian architecture, noted for sive examples of Georgian architecture, noted for itsitsexquisite crafted,paneled paneled exquisitebrickwork brickwork and and fifinely nely crafted, interior. The house was built for Carter Burwell, interior. The house was built for Carter Burwell, grandson the wealthiest wealthiest grandsonofofRobert Robert “King” “King” Carter, Carter, the and most influential figure in early 18th century and most influential figure in early 18th century Virginia. Named for the prominent Carter family, Virginia. Named for the prominent Carter family, Carter’s Grove occupies the site of an earlier Carter’s Grove occupies the site of an earlier tract tract known as Martin’s Hundred, first settled known as Martin’s Hundred, first settled by by English colonists in 1619, and is a National English colonists in 1619, and is a National Historic Landmark. Historic Landmark. Offered, under specific preservation covenants, the sale under today specifi presents a rare opportunity Offered, c preservation covenants, toto acquire an forAmerican treasure. more the public the first time since For the early information, please contact: 1930s, the sale today presents a rare opportunity to acquireStephen an American treasure. For more T. McLean, information, pleaseInc. contact Stephen T. McLean, McLean Faulconer Realtors - 434-295-1131 McLeansmclean@mcleanfaulconer.com Faulconer Inc. Realtors, 434-295-1131, smclean@mcleanfaulconer.com. www.mcleanfaulconer.com
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Keeping tabs on the economy Legal Elite lawyers offer perspectives from their specialties ankruptcies are falling, multifamily real estate activity is in high gear, but low interest rates alone wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get some other construction projects moving. Those are some of the observations made by members of the 2013 Virginia Legal Elite, a group of 868 lawyers selected by their peers as leading attorneys in 16 categories. Virginia Business began publishing the list in 2000 in collaboration with the Virginia Bar Association. This year the magazine emailed electronic ballots to nearly 11,600 Virginia lawyers and provided a ballot on its website. All licensed lawyers in Virginia are eligible to vote. More than 1,200 attorneys participated in this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Legal Elite, submitting 3,348 nominees. Of those roughly a quarter made the final list. In the following pages, the magazine
B
profiles a representative from each category. They are selected from the top 10 vote-getters in each group, but they are not necessarily the ones with the most votes. Lawyers who have been profiled in previous years were not eligible. Legal Elite lawyers have their fingers on the pulse of the state economy. For example, Christopher A. Jones, a partner with Whiteford Taylor & Preston LLP in Falls Church, says bankruptcy filings are falling. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Bankruptcy filings under all chapters are down from 2012, with commercial filings experiencing the largest drop,â&#x20AC;? he says. â&#x20AC;&#x153;This trend coincides with the upturn in the general economy.â&#x20AC;? In line with that good news, Thomas J. Colucci, a principal with Walsh Colucci Lubeley Emrich & Walsh PC in Arlington, says the Virginia real estate market is showing signs of revival, especially in multifam-
ily residential projects. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The office market remains somewhat sluggish, and I would anticipate that may continue until there is a little more stability brought to bear on anticipated government spending,â&#x20AC;? he says. Robert K. Cox, chair of the Construction Practice Group of Williams Mullen in Tysons Corner, makes a similar point in explaining the influence of low interest rates on construction projects. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Low interest rates are but one factor in encouraging new construction and alone cannot kickstart construction spending,â&#x20AC;? he notes. Cox points out educational facilities make up one of the largest nonresidential building sectors. However, budget constraints and limited growth in the student population â&#x20AC;&#x153;have kept this building sector down despite historically low interest rates.â&#x20AC;? In sum, the economyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s getting better, but we arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t back yet.
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VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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2013 Virginia Legal Elite
Table of Contents Alternative Dispute Resolution
Construction
LIST ..........................................41 PROFILE: Leslye S. Fenton ...............44 Odin, Feldman & Pittleman PC, Reston
Appellate Law
LIST ..........................................41 PROFILE: Frank K. Friedman.............46 Woods Rogers PLC, Roanoke
BANKRUPTCY/ CREDITOR’S RIGHTS
LIST ..........................................41 PROFILE: Christopher A. Jones ..........48 Whiteford Taylor & Preston LLP Falls Church
Business Law
LIST ..........................................42 PROFILE: George H. Roberts Jr. .........50 Wharton Aldhizer & Weaver PLC Harrisonburg/Lexington
Civil Litigation
LIST ..........................................45 PROFILE: Christopher Malone ...........52 ThompsonMcMullan PC, Richmond
LIST ..........................................49 PROFILE: Robert K. Cox ..................54 Williams Mullen, Tysons Corner
Criminal Law
LIST ..........................................51 PROFILE: Patrick H. O’Donnell ..........56 Kaufman & Canoles PC, Norfolk
Family Law/ Domestic Relations
LIST ..........................................53 PROFILE: Mary Burkey Owens ...........58 Owen & Owens PLC, Midlothian
Health Law
LIST ..........................................55 PROFILE: Thomas W. Greeson ...........60 Reed Smith LLP, Falls Church
Intellectual Property LIST ..........................................57 PROFILE: Marshall M. Curtis ............62 Whitham, Curtis, Christofferson & Cook PC Reston
Labor/Employment
LIST ..........................................59 PROFILE: Lisa A. Bertini ..................64 Bertini & Hammer PC, Norfolk
Legal Services/ Pro Bono
LIST ..........................................63 PROFILE: Phyllis C. Katz ....................66 Sands Anderson PC, Richmond
Legislative/Regulatory/ Administrative LIST ..........................................65 PROFILE: Dale G. Mullen ................68 McGuireWoods LLP, Richmond
Real Estate/Land Use
LIST ..........................................69 PROFILE: Thomas J. Colucci .............70 Walsh Colucci Lubeley Emrich & Walsh PC Arlington
Taxes/Estates/ Trusts/Elder Law
LIST ..........................................71 PROFILE: Neil L. Rose ....................72 Willcox & Savage PC, Virginia Beach
Young Lawyers
LIST ..........................................75 Gretchen M. Ostroff........................74 Vandeventer Black LLP, Norfolk
Hancock, Daniel, Johnson & Nagle P.C. Congratulates Virginia’s Legal Elite 2013 James M. Daniel Jr. Health Law
W. Scott Johnson W Legislative/Regulatory/ L Administrative A
W William H. Hall Jr. Business Law B
Rodney S. Dillman Young Lawyer (Under 40)
B. Page Gravely Alternative Dispute Resolution
Mary C. Malone Health Law
Kimberly W. Daniel Labor/Employment L
John B. Mumford Jr. Civil Litigation
Gerald C. Canaan Legislative/Regulatory/ Administrative
Michael R. Newby M Real Estate/Land Use R
Molly A. Huffman Alternative Dispute Resolution
Paul T. Walkinshaw Appellate Law
Mark C. Watson M Taxes/Estates/Trusts/ Elder Law E
The health law solution. www.hdjn.com
Offices in: Virginia South Carolina Tennessee West Virginia
www.VirginiaBusiness.com
Jodi B. Simopoulos Young Lawyer (Under 40)
VIRGINIA BUSINESS
39
_xztÄXÄ|àx 2 0 1 3 Sands Ander son PC
Congratulations to 28 of our attorneys for being named among the Virginia Business Legal Elite! left to right William N. Watkins - Construction Joel M. McCray - Health Law W. Ashley Burgess – Business Law Stefan M. Calos - Business Law William A. Gray - Bankruptcy/Creditors' Rights Jeffrey H. Geiger (and Lucy*) - Intellectual Property Robert B. "Chip" Delano, Jr. - Appellate Law Elizabeth L. Gunn - Young Lawyer (under 40) Bruce L. Mertens - Taxes/Estates/Trusts/Elder Law
Brian R. Pitney - Business Law John B. "Jack" Catlett, Jr. - Taxes/Estates/Trusts/Elder Law Ann Neil Cosby - Legislative/Regulatory/Administrative C. Thomas Ebel - Business Law L. Lee Byrd - Civil Litigation Phyllis C. Katz - Legal Services/Pro Bono Terrence L. Graves - Alternative Dispute Resolution Douglas A. Winegardner - Alternative Dispute Resolution David W. Hearn - Civil Litigation C. Michael DeCamps - Labor/Employment
Bradford A. King - Legislative/Regulatory/Administrative Henry C. Spalding, III -Construction Benjamin W. Emerson - Real Estate/Land Use Cullen D. Seltzer - Civil Litigation Karen S. Elliott - Labor/Employment not in photo Colleen M. Gentile - Health Law Margaret F. Hardy - Legal Services/Pro Bono J. Jonathan Schraub - Civil Litigation Roy M. Terry, Jr. - Bankruptcy/Creditors' Rights
*Lucy serves as our office mascot and attitude adjustment technician.
www.SandsAnderson.com RICHMOND - CHRISTIANSBURG - FREDERICKSBURG - McLEAN - RALEIGH, NC 1111 E. Main Street, Suite 2400 Post Office Box 1998 Richmond, VA 23218-1998 804-648-1636
2013 Virginia Legal Elite ALTERNATIVE DISPUTE RESOLUTION The Hon. Michael C. Allen, RET. The McCammon Group Richmond The Hon. Joanne F. Alper, Ret. The McCammon Group Arlington Jeffrey F. Brooke Poole Mahoney PC Virginia Beach Gary Wayne Brown McCandlish & Lillard PC Fairfax
Molly August Huffman Hancock, Daniel, Johnson & Nagle PC Glen Allen
John B. Thompson ThompsonMcMullan PC Richmond
Stuart Alan Raphael Hunton & Williams McLean
Jonathan Louis Kales Kales & Kales PLC Fairfax
Guy K. Tower The McCammon Group Richmond
Robert K. Richardson Odin, Feldman & Pittleman PC Reston
Walter D. Kelley Jr. Jones Day Washington
Craig Elliott White Sevila, Saunders, Huddleston & White PC Leesburg
Stephen Michael Sayers Hunton & Williams McLean
Stanley Klein Blankingship & Keith PC Fairfax The Hon. Joseph Leafe The McCammon Group Richmond Mark Douglas Loftis Woods Rogers PLC Roanoke
Andrew Philip Sherrod Hirschler Fleischer Richmond
Douglas Aaron Winegardner Sands Anderson PC Richmond Paul Marshall Yoder Wharton Aldhizer & Weaver PLC Harrisonburg
Adam White Smith McCandlish & Lillard PC Fairfax
APPELLATE LAW
George A. Somerville Troutman Sanders LLP Richmond
Curtis G. Manchester Reed Smith LLP Richmond
Tillman Breckenridge Reed Smith LLP LLP Richmond
John Charles Thomas Hunton & Williams Richmond
A. Blanton Massey Virginia Mediation Fredericksburg
John Tracy Walker IV McGuireWoods LLP Richmond
The Hon. Dennis W. Dohnal, RET. The McCammon Group Richmond
Gary Alvin Bryant Willcox & Savage PC Norfolk
John B. McCammon The McCammon Group Richmond
R. Johan Conrod Jr. Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
Paul Thomas Walkinshaw Hancock, Daniel, Johnson & Nagle PC Fairfax
Kimberly Potter Fauss New Growth Ventures LLC Richmond
The Hon. John J. McGrath Jr., Ret. Juridical Solutions PLC Harrisonburg
Robert B. Delano Jr. Sands Anderson PC Richmond
Jack W. (JB) Burtch Jr. Macaulay & Burtch PC Richmond Frank N. Cowan CowanGates PC Richmond
Leslye S. Fenton Odin, Feldman & Pittleman PC Reston
Lawrence D. Diehl Barnes & Diehl PC Chesterfield
Joan S. Morrow Joan Morrow PA Williamsburg
The Hon. Johanna L. Fitzpatrick, Ret. The McCammon Group Richmond
John H. OBrion Jr. The McCammon Group Richmond
Lynn Fletcher Lynn Fletcher Attorney at Law PC Falls Church
Hugh L. Patterson Willcox & Savage PC Norfolk
William E. Franczek Vandeventer Black LLP Norfolk
Mark Edward Rubin The McCammon Group Richmond
Jeanne Frances Franklin Franklin Solutions Arlington B. Page Gravely Hancock, Daniel, Johnson & Nagle PC Glen Allen Terrence LeMarr Graves Sands Anderson PC Richmond Grayson P. Hanes Reed Smith LLP Falls Church Michael Edwin Harman Harman Claytor Corrigan & Wellman Richmond Collin J. Hite Hirschler Fleischer Richmond Tracy Ann Houck Parrish, Houck & Snead PLC Fredericksburg
Robert Arnold Dybing ThompsonMcMullan PC Richmond L. Steven Emmert Sykes, Bourdon, Ahern & Levy PC Virginia Beach Frank K. Friedman Woods Rogers PLC Roanoke
D. Alan Rudlin Hunton & Williams Richmond
Earle Duncan Getchell Jr. Office of the Attorney General Richmond
The Hon. Thomas S. Shadrick, RET. The McCammon Group Virginia Beach
Jeanine Irving Sevila, Saunders, Huddleston & White PC Leesburg
William Henry Shewmake LeClairRyan Richmond
Craig Thomas Merritt Christian & Barton LLP Richmond
Richard F. Smith Smith Pachter McWhorter PLC Vienna
Monica T. Monday Gentry Locke Rakes & Moore Roanoke
Michael Laurence Sterling Vandeventer Black LLP Norfolk
James Joseph O’Keeffe IV Gentry Locke Rakes & Moore Roanoke
The Hon. F. Bradford Stillman, Ret. The McCammon Group Richmond
Edward James Powers Vandeventer Black LLP Norfolk
The Hon. Diane M. Strickland, Ret. The McCammon Group Richmond
Joseph Michael Rainsbury LeClairRyan Roanoke
www.VirginiaBusiness.com
BANKRUPTCY/ CREDITORS’ RIGHTS Benjamin C. Ackerly Hunton & Williams Richmond Darren W. Bentley Clement & Wheatley Danville Paula Steinhilber Beran Tavenner & Beran PLC Richmond Paul Sebastian Bliley Jr. Williams Mullen Richmond Richard Owen Bolger Bolger Law Firm PLLC Fairfax Ann Burke Brogan Crowley, Liberatore, Ryan & Brogan PC Norfolk Tyler Perry Brown Hunton & Williams Richmond Paul K. Campsen Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk William Hale Casterline Jr. Blankingship & Keith PC Fairfax Karen Marie Crowley Crowley, Liberatore, Ryan & Brogan PC Norfolk Dale Alan Davenport Hoover Penrod PLC Harrisonburg
VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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2013 Virginia Legal Elite Carl A. Eason Wolcott Rivers Gates Virginia Beach
Jennifer McLain McLemore Christian & Barton LLP Richmond
Tara Leigh Elgie Hunton & Williams Richmond Augustus Charles Epps Jr. Christian & Barton LLP Richmond Douglas Michael Foley McGuireWoods LLP Washington, D.C. William A. Gray Sands Anderson PC Richmond David Armistead Greer Law Offices of David A. Greer PLC Norfolk Michael E. Hastings Whiteford Taylor & Preston LLP Roanoke Jonathan Leigh Hauser Troutman Sanders LLP Virginia Beach Dion William Hayes McGuireWoods LLP Richmond Hannah Hutman Hannah W. Hutman PLLC Harrisonburg Christopher A. Jones Whiteford Taylor & Preston LLP Falls Church David Wayne Lannetti Vandeventer Black LLP Norfolk
Matthew Douglas Meadows Jones, Blechman, Woltz & Kelly PC Newport News Stephan William Milo Wharton Aldhizer & Weaver PLC Harrisonburg Michael David Mueller Christian & Barton LLP Richmond Christopher L. Perkins LeClairRyan Richmond Robert P. Quadros Quadros & Associates PC Newport News Ross Campbell Reeves Willcox & Savage PC Norfolk James W. Reynolds Odin, Feldman & Pittleman PC Reston Robert V. Roussos Roussos, Lassiter, Glanzer & Barnhart PLC Norfolk David Richard Ruby ThompsonMcMullan PC Richmond Troy Savenko Kaplan Voekler Cunningham & Frank PLC Richmond
BUSINESS LAW Jeffrey Robert Adams Wharton Aldhizer & Weaver PLC Harrisonburg James Meade Anderson III McGuireWoods LLP Richmond James Edward Autry Culin, Sharp, Autry & Day PLC Fairfax Robert Brian Ball Williams Mullen Richmond Mark R. Baumgartner Pender & Coward Virginia Beach Robert Mason Bayler Jr. Troutman Sanders LLP Richmond William James Bethune McCandlish & Lillard PC Fairfax Gregory Roger Bishop Williams Mullen Richmond Mark Wayne Botkin BotkinRose PLC Harrisonburg Thomas C. Brown Jr. McGuireWoods LLP Tysons Corner W. Ashley Burgess Sands Anderson PC Richmond
C. Thomas Ebel Sands Anderson PC Richmond S. Brian Farmer Hirschler Fleischer Richmond Russell Allen Fink Titan America LLC Norfolk G. Franklin Flippin Gentry Locke Rakes & Moore Roanoke Thomas R. Frantz Williams Mullen Virginia Beach Guy R. Friddell III Landmark Media Enterprises LLC Norfolk C. Christopher Giragosian Hunton & Williams McLean Allen C. Goolsby III Hunton & Williams Richmond Grant Stephen Grayson LeClairRyan Richmond Michael Cesar Guanzon Clement & Wheatley Danville John Owen Gwathmey Troutman Sanders LLP Richmond William Hiram Hall Jr. Hancock, Daniel, Johnson & Nagle PC Glen Allen
Stephen Everett Leach Leach Travell Britt PC McLean
Donald Charles Schultz Crenshaw, Ware & Martin PLC Norfolk
C. Benton Burroughs Jr. Reed Smith LLP Falls Church
Bradley A. Haneberg Kaufman & Canoles PC Richmond
Mark Clifton Leffler Boleman Law Firm PC Richmond
W. H. Schwarzschild III Williams Mullen Richmond
Stefan Mitchell Calos Sands Anderson PC Richmond
Stephen Todd Heitz Litten & Sipe LLP Harrisonburg
Dennis T. Lewandowski Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
David Kohlman Spiro Hirschler Fleischer Richmond
Nicholas C. Conte Woods Rogers PLC Roanoke
John Christian Hodges Dunton, Simmons & Dunton LLP White Stone
Tariq Kamal Louka Bischoff Martingayle PC Virginia Beach
Lynn Lewis Tavenner Tavenner & Beran PLC Richmond
Beverley L. Crump DurretteCrump PLC Richmond
Michael Joseph Holleran Walton & Adams PC Reston
Robert M. Marino Redmon, Peyton & Braswell LLP Alexandria
Roy M. Terry Jr. Sands Anderson PC Richmond
Cyane B. Crump Attorney at Law Richmond
Jeffrey Laurence Marks Kaufman & Canoles PC Virginia Beach
Madeline Agnes Trainor Cyron & Miller LLP Alexandria
Clifford A. Cutchins IV McGuireWoods LLP Richmond
Bruce Howard Matson LeClairRyan Richmond
Robert Schaefer Westermann Hirschler Fleischer Richmond
David Lee Dallas Jr. Williams Mullen Charlottesville
Richard Clifford Maxwell Woods Rogers PLC Roanoke
Peter Gilbert Zemanian Zemanian Law Group Norfolk
Harwell McCoy Darby Jr. Glenn Feldmann Darby & Goodlatte Roanoke
John D. McIntyre Wilson & McIntyre PLLC Norfolk
42
DECEMBER 2013
David M. Delpierre Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
Thomas Corbett Inglima Willcox & Savage PC Norfolk Thomas G. Johnson Jr. Willcox & Savage PC Norfolk F. Claiborne “Jay” Johnston * Troutman Sanders LLP Richmond Samuel J. Kaufman Owen & Owens PLC Midlothian Monroe Kelly III Williams Mullen Virginia Beach
* Retired
congratulates our attorneys who have been selected to VIRGINIA’S LEGAL ELITE as listed in Virginia Business magazine A Virginia Law Firm
With a Reputation for Quality Representation - FAMILY LAW Edward Barnes
- CRIMINAL LAW - ESTATE PLANNING Lawrence Diehl
- APPELLATE LAW
Michael HuYoung
Harris Leiner
Robe Ro Robert bert rt L L. Harr H Harris, arris is Jr Jr
A Tradition of Experience and Devotion to Family Law – Chris Macturk
Brian Jones
Over the past three decades, BARNES & DIEHL, P.C. has acquired the resources, the reputation and the skilled team of legal professionals necessary to focus on family law issues for individuals in Richmond and statewide.
Call 804-796-1000
2013 Virginia Legal Elite
ALTERNATIVE DISPUTE RESOLUTION
Leslye S. Fenton Odin, Feldman & Pittleman PC Reston Title: Attorney/shareholder Other legal specialties: Commercial leasing, family law Birthplace: New York City Education: Hofstra University, bachelor’s degree; Yeshiva University, master’s degree in social work; George Mason School of Law, law degree. Spouse: Jonathan Moreno Children: Jarrett Moreno, Jillian Moreno Hobbies or pastimes: Hiking, cooking First job as a lawyer: Odin, Feldman & Pittleman PC Fan of: College basketball Favorite vacation spot: Berkshires Recently read book: “The Burgess Boys” by Elizabeth Strout Career mentors: “Founders of my firm: David Feldman, Dexter Odin and Jimmy Pittleman.” How did you become involved in alternative dispute resolution? “After college and before law school I was fortunate to work in a pilot mediation program in the court system. Working with potential delinquents in the program showed me the importance of helping people reach consensus. Once individuals listen to one another and try to understand the other party’s position they are usually more willing to move toward a resolution. Being heard is a powerful tool.” What advantages does ADR offer over settling a dispute in court? “Whether mediation, negotiation or arbitration is used, ADR affords parties an opportunity to work together in a less adversarial atmosphere. Although parties do not reach their own decision if they use arbitration, each party still retains more control and flexibility than litigation. ADR is often more cost-effective, definitely less emotionally taxing than litigation and certainly faster. Whether the dispute to be resolved is commercial or personal, outcomes are generally more satisfactory as each party has had an opportunity to be heard and to more fully participate in the process.”
44
DECEMBER 2013
Photo Photo by by Mark Mark Rhodes Rhodes
2013 Virginia Legal Elite Joseph H. Latchum Jr. Williams Mullen Newport News
Thomas Michael Rose Troutman Sanders LLP Virginia Beach
Matthew Von Schuch Wharton Aldhizer & Weaver PLC Harrisonburg
David A. Lawrence Odin, Feldman & Pittleman PC Reston
John M. Ryan Vandeventer Black LLP Norfolk
Charles Edward Wall Williams Mullen Richmond
Gary D. LeClair LeClairRyan Richmond
John M. Scheib Norfolk Southern Corp. Norfolk
James John Wheaton Liberty Tax Service Virginia Beach
Andrew Mayo Lohmann Hirschler Fleischer Richmond
Robert Edwin Sevila Sevila, Saunders, Huddleston & White PC Leesburg
Cher Wynkoop Willcox & Savage PC Norfolk
McAlister Crutchfield Marshall II The Brinks Co. Richmond
Roderick William Simmons Hirschler Fleischer Richmond
CIVIL LITIGATION
James B. Massey III Coleman & Massey PC Roanoke
George P. Snead Parrish, Houck & Snead PLC Fredericksburg
Vincent J. Mastracco Jr. Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
Eric John Sorenson Jr. Edmunds & Williams PC Lynchburg
Bryant Clark McGann Vandeventer Black LLP Norfolk
Raymond Harvey Suttle Jr. Jones, Blechman, Woltz & Kelly PC Newport News
Charles Vincent McPhillips Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
Wilson Randolph Trice ThompsonMcMullan PC Richmond
Joseph Kevin Muldowney Hirschler Fleischer Richmond
William R. Van Buren III Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
William Abner Old Jr. Dollar Tree Chesapeake
Michael Richard Vanderpool Vanderpool, Frostick & Nishanian PC Manassas
David Homer Pettit Feil, Pettit & Williams PLC Charlottesville Brian Roger Pitney Sands Anderson PC Richmond
Thomas E. Albro Tremblay & Smith PLLC Charlottesville Everette G. Allen Jr. LeClairRyan Richmond David N. Anthony Troutman Sanders LLP Richmond David L. Arnold Pender & Coward Suffolk William E. Artz William E. Artz PC Arlington Stanley G. Barr Jr. Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
Congratulations to Our Legal Elite
Andrew B. Pittman Troutman Sanders LLP Virginia Beach Albert H. Poole Poole Mahoney PC Virginia Beach Stephen Conwell Price McCandlish & Lillard PC Fairfax
F
ive Legal Elite, a name change, and new members of our firm top our latest news. We now count six Fellows in the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, and we were named a top tier Richmond family law firm by U.S. News and World Report.
Brian Christopher Purcell Willcox & Savage PC Virginia Beach John Matthew Ramirez Troutman Sanders LLP Virginia Beach Alfred Magill Randolph Jr. Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
Terrence R. Batzli Family Law
Andrea R. Stiles Mollie C. Barton Robert E. Henley III Donald K. Butler Family Law Young Lawyer (under 40) Family Law Family Law
Jonathan Bray Reed Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk George H. Roberts Jr. Wharton Aldhizer & Weaver PLC Lexington William Quinton Robinson Blankingship & Keith PC Fairfax
804.545.9800 www.VirginiaBusiness.com
www.bsbfamilylaw.com VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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2013 Virginia Legal Elite
APPELLATE LAW
Frank K. Friedman Woods Rogers PLC Roanoke Other legal specialties: Trial waiver topics Birthplace: New York City Education: Harvard College, bachelor’s degree; Vanderbilt University School of Law, law degree Spouse: Melissa W. Friedman Children: Nathan Windham Friedman, Sarah Paulina Friedman, Amelia Quinn Friedman Hobbies or pastimes: “I am a big sports fan, and I confess to following fantasy football and baseball — occasionally to excess. I enjoyed coaching rec league basketball, soccer and softball when our children were young. I play a little guitar, occasionally write on nonlegal subjects and frequently lumber on the treadmill.” First job as a lawyer: “My first job as a lawyer is the same job I have now. I have spent my entire legal career (including my summer clerkship!) at Woods Rogers.” Fan of: “I am a fan of football, basketball and baseball: my teams are Vanderbilt, Harvard, SEC football, and the Jets, Giants, Mets and Royals.” Favorite vacation spot: Ocean Isle, N.C. Recently read books: “City of Thieves” by David Benioff and “The Round House” by Louise Erdrich Career mentor: William B. Poff How is appellate law different from other legal specialties? “Appeals raise unique time pressures. Appellate attorneys receive very limited time to argue their case — and while trial attorneys often have significant control over their opening statements and closing arguments, appellate lawyers spend their fleeting 15 minutes of action fielding questions and going where the court takes them. A trial attorney also usually gets a verdict in the courtroom at the end of a trial — there is no such instant gratification (or disappointment) for an appellate attorney who finishes a hard-fought argument and then receives the result miles away and months later. Appellate decisions also face the test of time — they will be reviewed, studied and distinguished by future lawyers, perhaps over many years. As an appellate lawyer, I very much appreciate the opportunity to be involved, even peripherally, in the process of shaping jurisprudence.”
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DECEMBER 2013
Photo by Mark Rhodes Photo by Mark Rhodes
2013 Virginia Legal Elite William D. Bayliss Williams Mullen Richmond
John Daniel Epps Hunton & Williams Richmond
R. Braxton Hill IV Christian & Barton LLP Richmond
Lee Edward Berlik BerlikLaw LLC Reston
Hugh M. Fain III Spotts Fain PC Richmond
Charles Franklin Hilton Wharton Aldhizer & Weaver PLC Harrisonburg
William Carl Bischoff Bischoff Martingayle PC Virginia Beach
Calvin Wooding Fowler Jr. Williams Mullen Richmond
John A. C. Keith Blankingship & Keith PC Fairfax
Turner Anderson Broughton Williams Mullen Richmond
Angela H. France PCT Law Group PLLC Alexandria
Edward B. Lowry MichieHamlett Charlottesville
Lynn Kanaga Brugh IV Williams Mullen Richmond
Terry C. Frank Kaufman & Canoles PC Richmond
John C. Lynch Troutman Sanders LLP Virginia Beach
Elliott Matthew Buckner Cantor Stoneburner Ford Grana & Buckner PC Richmond
Randolph Douglas Frostick Vanderpool, Frostick & Nishanian PC Manassas
R. Peyton Mahaffey McCandlish & Lillard PC Fairfax
Allan S. Buffenstein McCandlish Holton PC Richmond
Edward Joseph Fuhr Hunton & Williams Richmond
Christopher M. Malone ThompsonMcMullan PC Richmond
Stephen Donegan Busch McGuireWoods LLP Richmond
Jeffrey H. Gray Troutman Sanders LLP Virginia Beach
Brad Marrs The Marrs Law Firm PLLC Richmond
L. Lee Byrd Sands Anderson PC Richmond
Jason Eliot John Ham Litten & Sipe LLP Harrisonburg
Lawrence Joseph McClafferty McCandlish & Lillard PC Fairfax
Wells Huntington Byrnes Clement & Wheatley Danville
Patrick R. Hanes Williams Mullen Richmond
John Becker Mumford Jr. Hancock, Daniel, Johnson & Nagle PC Glen Allen
Francis Hewitt Casola Woods Rogers PLC Roanoke
David Wayne Hearn Sands Anderson PC Richmond
Robert Lee Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Donnell Vandeventer Black LLP Norfolk
R. Paul Childress Jr. DurretteCrump PLC Richmond David Patrick Corrigan Harman Claytor Corrigan & Wellman Richmond James Christopher Cosby Vandeventer Black LLP Richmond Marc Ericson Darnell Kaufman & Canoles PC Newport News Bradfute W. Davenport Jr. Troutman Sanders LLP Richmond Jeremiah A. Denton Jeremiah A. Denton III Virginia Beach Michael Eugene Derdeyn Feil, Pettit & Williams PLC Charlottesville William Franklin Devine Williams Mullen Richmond Bernard Joseph DiMuro DiMuroGinsberg PC Alexandria S. Miles Dumville Reed Smith LLP Richmond Wyatt B. Durrette Jr. DurretteCrump PLC Richmond
Robert L. Dewey, Managing Partner
Leaders in terms of client service and overall strategic thinking. The attorneys think like business people. They understand our goals. This is what clients are saying. We invite you to see for yourself.
Proud to Represent Businesses Throughout Virginia www.VirginiaBusiness.com
VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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2013 Virginia Legal Elite
BANKRUPTCY/ CREDITORS RIGHTS
Christopher A. Jones Whiteford Taylor & Preston LLP Falls Church Title: Partner Other legal specialties: Litigation Birthplace: Seattle Education: Duke University, bachelor’s degree; University of Richmond, law degree Spouse: Kate Children: Sarah, 11; and Abby, 9 Hobbies or pastimes: Golf, family travel, reading First job as a lawyer: Associate at Maloney Barr & Huennekens PC (now Kutak Rock LLP) in Richmond Fan of: “Duke University – I bleed Duke blue” Favorite vacation spot: Scotland Recently read book: “John Adams” by David McCullough Career mentors: “I have had the opportunity to work with a number of excellent bankruptcy lawyers who have influenced my career, including the Hon. Kevin R. Huennekens, Bruce H. Matson, Lynn L. Tavenner and my current partners, Paul Nussbaum and Englander.” What trends are you seeing in bankruptcies since the height of the recession? “After five straight ‘boom’ years, insolvency professionals have seen a decline in work in 2013. Bankruptcy filings under all chapters are down from 2012, with commercial filings experiencing the largest drop. This trend coincides with the upturn in the general economy.” You have been involved in a number of high-profile corporate bankruptcy cases. Which was the most interesting or challenging case? “The most challenging case that I worked on involved a very wealthy individual who had no liquid assets. During our first week in the case, the client shot someone and was arrested. Undoubtedly, it was a unique situation. We worked for months to put together a Chapter 11 plan that paid back all creditors and returned significant assets to our client.” 48
DECEMBER 2013
Photo Photo by by Mark Mark Rhodes Rhodes
2013 Virginia Legal Elite Mark Dudley Obenshain Lenhart Obenshain PC Harrisonburg
Charles Michael Sims LeClairRyan Richmond
Kevin Philip Oddo LeClairRyan Roanoke
Hunter W. Sims Jr. Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
Scott Charles Oostdyk McGuireWoods LLP Richmond
Randy Darrell Singer Singer Legal Group Virginia Beach
Jennifer L. Parrish Parrish, Houck & Snead PLC Fredericksburg
James Curie Skilling Williams & Skilling PC Richmond
Jayne A. Pemberton ThompsonMcMullan PC Richmond
Thomas G. Slater Jr. Hunton & Williams Richmond
Cyrus E. Phillips Albo & Oblon LLP Arlington
Michael Willis Smith Christian & Barton LLP Richmond
J. Bryan Plumlee Poole Mahoney PC Chesapeake
Brett Alexander Spain Willcox & Savage PC Norfolk
William B. Porter Blankingship & Keith PC Fairfax
W. Edgar Spivey Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
John MacDonald Robb III LeClairRyan Richmond Glen M. Robertson Wolcott Rivers Gates Virginia Beach F. Doug Ross Odin, Feldman & Pittleman PC Reston
William Lewis Stauffer Jr. Williams Mullen Newport News Mark Douglas Stiles Virginia Beach City Attorney’s Office Virginia Beach
CONSTRUCTION Bruce Edwin Arkema DurretteCrump PLC Richmond J. Rudy Austin Gentry Locke Rakes & Moore Roanoke
Herbert Valentine Kelly Jr. Jones, Blechman, Woltz & Kelly PC Newport News
Brian Keith Brake Lenhart Obenshain PC Harrisonburg
William A. Lascara Pender & Coward Virginia Beach
Stephen Walter Brewer Willcox & Savage PC Norfolk
John Ralph Lockard Vandeventer Black LLP Norfolk
Kristan Boyd Burch Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
Robert H. J. Loftus McCandlish & Lillard PC Fairfax
William Alexander Burnett Williams Mullen Richmond
Neil S. Lowenstein Vandeventer Black LLP Norfolk Joseph S. Luchini Reed Smith LLP Falls Church
Tara L. Chadbourn Poole Mahoney PC Virginia Beach
K. Brett Marston Gentry Locke Rakes & Moore Roanoke
Mark Richard Colombell ThompsonMcMullan PC Richmond
William R. Mauck Spotts Fain PC Richmond
Thomas Andrew Coulter LeClairRyan Richmond
Richard C. Sullivan Jr. Reed Smith LLP Falls Church
Robert Knight Cox Williams Mullen Tysons Corner
Sandy T. Tucker Williams Mullen Richmond
Richard Ruffin Saunders Jr. Sevila, Saunders, Huddleston & White PC Leesburg
Mark E. Feldmann Glenn Feldmann Darby & Goodlatte Roanoke
William Woodul Tunner ThompsonMcMullan PC Richmond
Thomas R. Folk Reed Smith LLP Falls Church
J. Jonathan Schraub Sands Anderson PC McLean
William R. “Rob” Turner III Protogyrou & Rigney PLC Norfolk
Christian B. Franklin Parrish, Houck & Snead PLC Fredericksburg
Cullen D. Seltzer Sands Anderson PC Richmond
David Neil Ventker Ventker & Warman PLLC Norfolk
J. Scott Sexton Gentry Locke Rakes & Moore Roanoke
John Reel Walk Hirschler Fleischer Richmond
Yama A. Shansab Ferguson Walton & Shansab PLLC Reston
Wallace Bruce Wason Jr. Jones, Blechman, Woltz & Kelly PC Newport News
Robert Lee Samuel Jr. Williams Mullen Virginia Beach
Win Short Kaufman & Canoles PC Newport News Conrad M. Shumadine Willcox & Savage PC Norfolk Thomas Brady Shuttleworth Shuttleworth, Ruloff, Swain, Haddad & Morecock PC Virginia Beach
R. Webb Moore Hirschler Fleischer Richmond Terence Murphy Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
Robert Aristidis Ziogas Glenn Feldmann Darby & Goodlatte Roanoke
John Franklin III Taylor Walker Norfolk
John S. Pachter Smith Pachter McWhorter PLC Vienna Courtney Moates Paulk Hirschler Fleischer Richmond
David A. Hearne Outland, Gray, O’Keefe & Hubbard Chesapeake Christopher Garrett Hill The Law Office of Christopher G. Hill PC Glen Allen
www.VirginiaBusiness.com
John S. Norris Jr. Norris & St. Clair PC Virginia Beach John R. Owen Harman Claytor Corrigan & Wellman Richmond
Barry A. Hackney Hirschler Fleischer Richmond
Bryan William Horn FloranceGordonBrown PC Richmond
Edward Duffy Myrtetus Kaufman & Canoles PC Richmond Mark Charles Nanavati Sinnott Nuckols & Logan PC Midlothian
Michael John Gardner Troutman Sanders LLP Norfolk
Stanley Paul Wellman Harman Claytor Corrigan & Wellman Richmond
Timothy Raymond Hughes Bean Kinney & Korman PC Arlington
D. Stan Barnhill Woods Rogers PLC Roanoke
Gregory Neil Stillman Hunton & Williams Norfolk
Marshall Howard Ross Wharton Aldhizer & Weaver PLC Harrisonburg
Sally Ann Hostetler Odin, Feldman & Pittleman PC Reston
Glenn Walthall Pulley Clement & Wheatley Danville Jack Rephan Pender & Coward Virginia Beach Henry Cannon Spalding III Sands Anderson PC Richmond
VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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2013 Virginia Legal Elite
BUSINESS LAW
George H. “Skip” Roberts Jr. Wharton Aldhizer & Weaver PLC Harrisonburg/Lexington Title: Of Counsel Other legal specialties: Nonprofit organizations, estate planning, family office management Birthplace: Fort Lee Education: Virginia Military Institute, bachelor’s degree; University of Virginia School of Law, law degree Spouse: Kay Temple Roberts Children: Sarah K. Kaiser, Anne R. Smith Hobbies or pastimes: Fly fishing, hiking and reading First job as a lawyer: Associate, Wharton Aldhizer & Weaver Fan of: Track Favorite vacation spot: The Tetons Recently read book: Richard Atkinson’s “The Guns at Last Light” Career mentors: George S. Aldhizer II, George Aldhizer Jr. and Phillip C. Stone How can the legal environment for business in Virginia be improved? “While the legal demands for business require more and more specialization, the costs of such concentration are often beyond the reach of many, if not most, businesses in Virginia. This can be improved by developing more broadly trained business lawyers, sufficiently well versed in the wide-ranging specialties of the law to know when the specialists are truly needed and then to manage their engagements to give our clients truly cost-effective legal representation.” Why did you leave private practice to become executive vice president and general counsel to the VMI Foundation in the 1990s? “When VMI calls, you just don’t say ‘no.’ This was a rare opportunity to give something back to a school which has meant so much to me and my career. My partners at WAW could not have been more supportive. To have been at VMI during its litigation over and response to the admission of women will be the highlight of my legal career. This experience also shows how a broad-based practice may open up unexpected opportunities for public service and new careers.”
50
DECEMBER 2013
Photo Photo by by Mark Mark Rhodes Rhodes
2013 Virginia Legal Elite Gregory Thomas St. Ours Wharton Aldhizer & Weaver PLC Harrisonburg
Craig Stover Cooley Craig Stover Cooley Richmond
Trey Robert Kelleter Vandeventer Black LLP Norfolk
Stephen Gerard Test Williams Mullen Virginia Beach
Richard Cullen McGuireWoods LLP Richmond
Rodney G. Leffler Leffler & Associates Fairfax
Bruce E. Titus Rees Broome PC Tysons Corner
M. Tyson Daniel The Daniel Law Firm PC Roanoke
Alexander Nicholas Levay Jr. Alex Levay Attorney PLLC Leesburg
Brian James Vella Smith Pachter McWhorter PLC Vienna
William Jeffrey Dinkin Stone, Cardwell & Dinkin PLC Richmond
John E. Lichtenstein LichtensteinFishwick PLC Roanoke
William Norman Watkins Sands Anderson PC Richmond
Afshin Farashahi Afshin Farashahi PC Virginia Beach
G. Manoli Loupassi Law Office of G. Manoli Loupassi LLC Richmond
John Stephen Wilson Wilson & McIntyre PLLC Norfolk
William Robert Fitzpatrick Sevila, Saunders, Huddleston & White PC Leesburg
Robert Clarkson Lunger Wharton Aldhizer & Weaver PLC Staunton
James Laurent Windsor Kaufman & Canoles PC Virginia Beach
Charles Arthur Gavin Cawthorn, Deskevich & Gavin Richmond
Timothy Joseph McEvoy Cameron/McEvoy PLLC Fairfax
Thomas Marshall Wolf LeClairRyan Richmond
Peter David Greenspun Greenspun Shapiro PC Fairfax
Steven A. Merril Whitestone, Brent, Young & Merril PC Fairfax
CRIMINAL LAW
John C. Holloran The Law Offices of John C. Holloran Harrisonburg
Robert Gray Morecock Shuttleworth, Ruloff, Swain, Haddad & Morecock PC Virginia Beach
Michael HuYoung Barnes & Diehl PC Richmond
Patrick Hugh O’Donnell Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
Charles Everett James Jr. Williams Mullen Richmond
David A. Oblon Albo & Oblon LLP Arlington
John D. Adams McGuireWoods LLP Richmond Alan Dale Albert LeClairRyan Norfolk Tony Anderson Anderson & Friedman Roanoke Paul Graham Beers Glenn Feldmann Darby & Goodlatte Roanoke Steven David Benjamin Benjamin & DesPortes PC Richmond James Edward Bitner Bitner & Bitner Ltd. Oakton Bruce M. Blanchard Odin, Feldman & Pittleman PC Reston
Congratulations Richard Locke and Colleen Quinn. Again named Virginia Business Legal Elite, 16 years strong. Virginia Business Legal Elite , 2005, 2010 - 2013 Virginia Super Lawyers, 2006 - 2013 Top 25 Women, 2010 & 2011 Top 50 Women, 2012 & 2013 Top 50, 2011 & 2013 Top 100, 2012 & 2013
Virginia Business Legal Elite , 2002 - 2006 & 2008 - 2013 Virginia Super Lawyers, 2010 - 2013
Thomas Jack Bondurant Jr. Gentry Locke Rakes & Moore Roanoke Valerie Bowen Office of the Commonwealth’s Attorney York County James Orlando Broccoletti Zoby, Broccoletti & Normile PC Norfolk Gray Bolling Broughton Williams Mullen Richmond Claire Grimmer Cardwell Stone, Cardwell & Dinkin PLC Richmond Timothy Gerard Clancy Moschel, Clancy & Walter PLLC Hampton
At Locke & Quinn we have made some changes. We have re-focused because how our clients build and live their lives is what is most important. At Locke & Quinn, we focus on obtaining the optimal outcomes for personal legal issues whether they be family law or LGBT issues, personal injury, employment or trust and estate issues. Our job is to ensure the best legal outcome for our clients.
www.VirginiaBusiness.com
“Because How You Live Your Life Is Important.” 4928 West Broad St., Richmond, VA 23230 (804) 285-6253
s
www.lockequinn.com
VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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2013 Virginia Legal Elite
CIVIL LITIGATION
Christopher M. Malone ThompsonMcMullan PC Richmond Title: Attorney/managing director Other legal specialties: Construction law, adoption law Birthplace: Washington, D.C. Education: College of William & Mary, bachelor’s degree; University of Virginia, law degree; St. Leo’s University, master’s in theology. Spouse: Nancy Children: Chad, Matthew, Cecelia, Ryan, Brandon Hobbies or pastimes: Hiking, spending time with family and friends First job as a lawyer: Law clerk at Supreme Court of Virginia Fan of: New York Yankees Favorite vacation spot: Lubec, Maine Recently read book: “The Good Bishop: The Life of Walter F. Sullivan” by Phyllis Theroux Career mentors: Justice Richard H. Poff, John B. Thompson, C. Grice McMullan Jr. What has been your most memorable civil litigation case? “In my first jury trial, I represented the mother of a decedent on a claim for accidental death benefits under her son’s life insurance policy. After a misbegotten family shopping trip in Williamsburg, a dispute arose, and the son was stabbed during an ongoing affray on the side of Route 60. The jury adopted our view that the stabbing was unforeseeable because the couple fought all the time, and no one had ever been stabbed before. The verdict came back in favor of our claim in 30 minutes, with prejudgment interest. Fortunately, an appeal was not pursued.” Your practice includes construction litigation. What effect did the recession have on construction disputes? “In the business of construction, trouble always follows when someone holds the dollar. In this recent recession, the cash flow on projects became slow and sometimes nonexistent. The results were seen in an initial increase in mechanics’ liens, contractor and subcontractor bankruptcies, bank and bonding company takeover of projects, and regrettably, the loss of contractors that had prospered for generations in Virginia. Predictably, litigation slowed down as the likelihood of collection became more uncertain. In the end, settlements at low amounts often were agreed to because of the cost of litigation and the financial circumstances of both plaintiff and defendant.” 52
DECEMBER 2013
PhotoPhoto by Mark Rhodes by Mark Rhodes
2013 Virginia Legal Elite Karin Riley Porter Price Benowitz LLP Fairfax
Julie Marie Cillo Hall & Hall PLC Midlothian
Richard E. Garriott Jr. Pender & Coward Virginia Beach
Michael Anthony Robusto Slipow, Robusto & Kellam PC Virginia Beach
David Rust Clarke Blankingship & Keith PC Fairfax
David Lawrence Ginsberg Cooper Ginsberg Gray PLLC Fairfax
Andrew M. Sacks Sacks & Sacks Norfolk
Mary G. Commander Commander & Carlson Norfolk
Carolyn Mary Grimes Lieblich & Grimes PC Alexandria
David Edward Sher Sher, Cummings and Ellis Arlington
Joseph A. Condo The Condo Law Group PC McLean
John Pendleton Grove Woods Rogers PLC Roanoke
Larry Benjamin Slipow Slipow, Robusto & Kellam PC Virginia Beach
Nancy Douglas Cook Family Law Associates of Richmond PC Richmond
Robert Lee Harris Jr. Barnes & Diehl PC Chesterfield
Franklin A. Swartz Swartz, Taliaferro, Swartz & Goodove PC Norfolk
E. Thomas Cox E. Thomas Cox, Attorney at Law Yorktown
Jacqueline Cook Hedblom Hirschler Fleischer Richmond
Patrick Tench Jones, Blechman, Woltz & Kelly PC Newport News
Laura Ann Evans Evans Law Group Harrisonburg
Robert Edward Henley III Batzli Stiles Butler PC Richmond
Howard Crawford Vick Jr. McGuireWoods LLP Richmond
Cheshire I’Anson Eveleigh Wolcott Rivers Gates Virginia Beach
Susan Massie Hicks The Susan Hicks Group PC Fairfax
Lawrence Hunter Woodward Jr. Shuttleworth, Ruloff, Swain, Haddad & Morecock PC Virginia Beach
Sherry Ann Fox ThompsonMcMullan PC Richmond
Brian Mitchell Hirsch Hirsch & Ehlenberger PC Reston
Dickson John Young Whitestone, Brent, Young & Merril PC Fairfax
Humes J. Franklin III Wharton Aldhizer & Weaver PLC Staunton
Elizabeth Bliemel Hurd Dunton, Simmons & Dunton LLP White Stone
FAMILY/DOMESTIC RELATIONS
Melanie Anne Friend CowanGates PC Richmond
Brian H. Jones Barnes & Diehl PC Chesterfield
Luis A. Abreu Luis A. Abreu PLLC Danville Debra C. Albiston Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk Allison Wittersheim Anders Kaufman & Canoles PC Virginia Beach Susan Carol Armstrong Armstrong Law Firm PLLC Richmond Edward D. Barnes Barnes & Diehl PC Chesterfield Terrence Raymond Batzli Batzli Stiles Butler PC Richmond Dale Truit Berrett Kaufman & Canoles PC Virginia Beach Donald Keith Butler Batzli Stiles Butler PC Richmond Sandra T. Chinn-Gilstrap Woods Rogers PLC Danville
Elite Relationships. Congratulations to all the attorneys who were named among Virginia Business’ “Legal Elite,” especially those we call our own. They understand the importance of building strong, powerful relationships. To learn more, visit reedsmith.com.
ReedSmith The business of relationships.
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Peter V. Chiusano Abrons, Fasanaro, Chiusano & Sceviour PLLC Virginia Beach George A. Christie Christie, Kantor, Griffin, Smith & Harris PC Virginia Beach www.VirginiaBusiness.com
Attorneys from our Richmond and Falls Church offices Michael Banzhaf, Real Estate/Land Use Tillman Breckenridge, Appellate Law Benton Burroughs, Business Law Helen Connolly, Young Lawyer (Under 40) Bob Diamond, Real Estate/Land Use Mike Dingman, Legal Services/Pro Bono Miles Dumville, Civil Litigation Karen Fagelson, Real Estate/Land Use Tom Folk, Construction Brent Gary, Young Lawyer (Under 40) Betty Graumlich, Labor/Employment Tom Greeson, Health Law Gray Hanes, Alternative Dispute Resolution Carol Honigberg, Real Estate/Land Use David Houston, Real Estate/Land Use Lane Kneedler, Legislative/Regulatory/Administrative Julia Krebs-Markrich, Health Law Joe Luchini, Construction Curt Manchester, Alternative Dispute Resolution Edward Mullen, Legislative/Regulatory/Administrative Brad Newberg, Intellectual Property Lorin Patterson, Health Law Greg Rupert, Taxes/Estates/Trusts/Elder Law Travis Sabalewski, Legal Services/Pro Bono Matt Sheldon, Intellectual Property Rip Sullivan, Civil Litigation Bill Thomas, Legislative/Regulatory/Administrative Eric Wang, Taxes/Estates/Trusts/Elder Law Mark Wasserman, Intellectual Property
VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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2013 Virginia Legal Elite
CONSTRUCTION LAW
Robert K. Cox Williams Mullen Tysons Corner Title: Chair, Construction Practice Group Other legal specialties: Surety law Birthplace: Pittsburgh Education: Cornell University, bachelor’s degree in economics; George Washington University, law degree with honors Spouse: Terry M. Cox Children: Kacey M. Cox, Carly S. Cox Hobbies or pastimes: Reading, “weak game of golf” First jobs as a lawyer: Lewis, Mitchell & Moore of Vienna Fan of: Pittsburgh Pirates, Penguins and Steelers Favorite vacation spot: “Any beach with warm water.” Recently read books: “The Wife of Martin Guerre” by Janet Lewis; “Hell or Richmond” by Ralph Peters Career mentors: “Early in my legal career, George E. Mezey Jr. and Stephen R. Isaacson, then two rising project executives from different clients, taught me the business of construction. Through them, I learned the economics, principles and protocols of the players and projects making up the construction industry. By teaching me the construction industry, they made me a better construction lawyer.” Have low interest rates encouraged your clients to begin new construction projects? “Low interest rates are but one factor in encouraging new construction and alone cannot kickstart construction spending. For example, one of the largest nonresidential building sectors is educational facilities. Yet, the demands on limited budgets of local and state governments, coupled with diminished tax revenue due to unemployment and lack of new industry growth, when combined with reduced need from limited student population growth, have kept this building sector down despite historically low interest rates.” 54
DECEMBER 2013
Photo Photo by by Mark Mark Rhodes Rhodes
2013 Virginia Legal Elite Sean Patrick Kelly Kelly Byrnes & Danker PLLC Fairfax
Arthur von Keller IV von Keller Law PC Manassas
Patrick Campbell Devine Jr. Williams Mullen Norfolk
Joseph R. Lassiter Jr. Roussos, Lassiter, Glanzer & Barnhart PLC Norfolk
David Gerard Weaver Weaver Law Firm PC Roanoke
Tasos Anthony Galiotos Willcox & Savage PC Virginia Beach
Harris Wayne Leiner Barnes & Diehl PC Richmond
John Caroll Leon Whitbeck Jr. Whitbeck Cisneros McElroy PC Leesburg
Colleen M. Gentile Sands Anderson PC Richmond
Richard Lewis Locke Locke & Quinn Richmond
Brandon Harvey Zeigler Wolcott Rivers Gates Virginia Beach
M. Todd Gerber Poole Mahoney PC Virginia Beach
Christopher Hunt Macturk Barnes & Diehl PC Richmond
HEALTH LAW
Michael L. Goodman Goodman Allen & Filetti PLLC Glen Allen
Katharine Wesley Maddox The Maddox Law Firm Vienna Britney Hope Maddux Jones, Blechman, Woltz & Kelly PC Newport News Reeves W. Mahoney Poole Mahoney PC Virginia Beach Michael Christopher May Albo & Oblon LLP Arlington J. Patrick McConnell Odin, Feldman & Pittleman PC Reston Michael James McHugh The McHugh Law Firm Arlington
Wyatt Sanford Beazley IV Williams Mullen Richmond Mark Sheridan Brennan Vandeventer Black LLP Richmond William Leonard Carey Blankingship & Keith PC Fairfax Kevin Lincoln Cash Edmunds & Williams PC Lynchburg James Murrell Daniel Jr. Hancock, Daniel, Johnson & Nagle PC Glen Allen Jason Robert Davis Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
Quinn Feldmann Graeff Medical Facilities of America Inc. Roanoke Steven Douglas Gravely Troutman Sanders LLP Richmond Thomas W. Greeson Reed Smith LLP Falls Church Richard L. Grier ThompsonMcMullan PC Richmond Mark Steven Hedberg Hunton & Williams Richmond John Codd Ivins Jr. Hirschler Fleischer Richmond
Mary Burkey Owens Owen & Owens PLC Midlothian Robert Wayne Partin McCandlish Holton PC Richmond Sarah A. Piper The Maddox Law Firm Vienna Colleen Marea Quinn Locke & Quinn Richmond Frank Waters Rogers III Mundy Rogers & Associates LLP Roanoke Douglas Jay Sanderson McCandlish & Lillard PC Fairfax Rachael Adrienne Sanford Clement & Wheatley Danville Victor Samuel Skaff III Guynn, Memmer & Dillon PC Salem Andrea Rowse Stiles Batzli Stiles Butler PC Richmond
Hall & Hall is proud to celebrate its 1 year anniversary at its Short Pump location! Virginia Family Law and Elder Law Attorneys
Laura Ann Thornton Laura A. Thornton PLC Harrisonburg Ronald R. Tweel MichieHamlett Charlottesville
Established in 1969
12090 West Broad Street • Richmond, Virginia 23233 • Phone 804-897-1515 1401 Huguenot Rd., Suite 100 • Midlothian, VA 23113 • Phone: 804-897-1515
www.hallandhallfamilylaw.com www.VirginiaBusiness.com
VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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2013 Virginia Legal Elite
CRIMINAL LAW
Patrick H. O’Donnell Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk Title: Partner Other legal specialties: Government contracts, export controls, admiralty and maritime, general business litigation Birthplace: Washington, D.C. Education: Radford University, bachelor’s degree in economics; University of Virginia School of Law, law degree. Spouse: Mary O’Donnell, a consultant for Isagenix Children: Connor O’Donnell, a senior at Virginia Tech; Chris O’Donnell, a sophomore at Radford University; and Meghan O’Donnell, a junior at Maury High School in Norfolk Hobbies: Fishing, working on boats (“mostly mine”), baseball, reading about history First job as lawyer: As a law student, worked for U.Va. Legal Advisors Office; first job after passing the bar — law clerk to U.S. District Judge Richard B. Kellam, Eastern District of Virginia Fan of: Washington Nationals, Redskins, U.Va. and Radford sports teams Favorite vacation spot: Hatteras Island and now Ireland (after a recent visit) Recently read book: “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern” by Stephen Greenblatt Career mentors: Hunter W. Sims Jr. (partner, Kaufman and Canoles), the late John R. Crumpler (former partner, K&C) and Terence Murphy (partner, K&C). What was your most interesting criminal law case? “Working with my partner, Hunter Sims, defending Richard Holland Jr. in United States v. Holland — a case involving a 31-count indictment for bank fraud against former Virginia state Sen. Richard Holland and his son, Richard Holland Jr. The case involved an honest and stubborn father and son who managed The Farmer’s Bank of Windsor, but had angered the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The FDIC decided it would teach a lesson to these two small-town bankers by bringing down on them the awesome power that the federal government can summon. But, in the end, it was the stubborn father and son who prevailed against all odds when Judge Henry Morgan threw out the government’s entire case and found that the prosecution had not been conducted for just reasons.” 56
DECEMBER 2013
Photo Photo by by Mark Mark Rhodes Rhodes
2013 Virginia Legal Elite Matthew Dimmock Jenkins Hunton & Williams Richmond
Kimberly Ann Satterwhite Herbert & Satterwhite PC Richmond
Peter Edwin Broadbent Jr. Christian & Barton LLP Richmond
Jonathan M. Joseph Christian & Barton LLP Richmond
Thomas James Stallings McGuireWoods LLP Richmond Jeffrey Lance Stredler Amerigroup Corp. Virginia Beach
Duncan G. Byers Byers Law Group Norfolk
Samuel N. Klewans Grad, Logan & Klewans PC Falls Church Nathan Adam Kottkamp McGuireWoods LLP Richmond Julia C. Krebs-Markrich Reed Smith LLP Falls Church Jeffrey Grant Lenhart Lenhart Obenshain PC Harrisonburg Peter Lipresti Peter Lipresti PC Fairfax Mary Claybrooke Malone Hancock, Daniel, Johnson & Nagle PC Glen Allen Heman A. Marshall III Woods Rogers PLC Roanoke Jamie Baskerville Martin McCandlish Holton PC Richmond Sherri Mearns Matson Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters Norfolk
Zachary Daniel Cohen ThompsonMcMullan PC Richmond
Molly E. Trant Riverside Health System Newport News
Christopher Michael Collins Vanderpool, Frostick & Nishanian PC Manassas
John S. Wisiackas Odin, Feldman & Pittleman PC Reston
James Robert Creekmore The Creekmore Law Firm PC Blacksburg
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Marshall Murat Curtis Whitham, Curtis, Christofferson & Cook PC Reston
Charles M. Allen Jr. Goodman Allen & Filetti PLLC Glen Allen
Stephen Patrick Demm Hunton & Williams Richmond
Robert A. Angle Troutman Sanders LLP Richmond
Douglas W. Densmore CowanPerry Roanoke
Joel Ankney Virginia Entrepreneur Law Office Virginia Beach Patrick Christopher Asplin Lenhart Obenshain PC Charlottesville Tara A. Branscom CowanPerry Roanoke
John Blanton Farmer Leading-Edge Law Group PLC Richmond Daniel Leroy Fitch Wharton Aldhizer & Weaver PLC Harrisonburg Jeffrey H. Geiger Sands Anderson PC Richmond
J. Robert McAllister III McCandlish & Lillard PC Fairfax Thomas W. McCandlish McCandlish Holton PC Richmond Stephen C. McCoy Patient First Corp. Glen Allen Joel Mark McCray Sands Anderson PC Richmond T. Braxton McKee Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk Peter Mason Mellette Mellette PC Williamsburg Jennifer L. Muse Jones, Blechman, Woltz & Kelly PC Newport News Lorin E. Patterson Reed Smith LLP Falls Church Stacy Ross Purcell Eastern Virginia Medical School Norfolk R. Brent Rawlings Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association Glen Allen Stephen D. Rosenthal Troutman Sanders LLP Richmond
Congratulates Virginia’s Legal Elite 2013 Adam Rafal
Jane Tucker
Labor/Employment
Intellectual Property
Anne Bibeau
John Lockard
Labor/Employment
Construction
Arlene Klinedinst
John Ryan
Labor/Employment
Business Law
Bryant McGann
Mark Brennan
Business Law
Health Law
Christopher Ambrosio
Michael Sterling
Real Estate/Land Use
Alternative Dispute Resolution
Daniel Weckstein
Neil Lowenstein
Legislative/Regulatory/Administrative
Construction
David Lannetti
Patrick Herman
Bankruptcy/Creditors’ Rights
Taxes/Estates/Trusts/Elder Law
Deborah Casey
Robert O’Donnell
Real Estate/Land Use
Civil Litigation
Edward Powers
Trey Kelleter
Appellate Law
Criminal Law
Gretchen Ostroff
William Franczek
Young Lawyer (under 40)
Alternative Dispute Resolution
James Cosby Civil Litigation
www.vanblk.com www.VirginiaBusiness.com
VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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2013 Virginia Legal Elite
FAMILY LAW/DOMESTIC RELATIONS
Mary Burkey Owens Owen & Owens PLC Midlothian Title: Founding partner Other legal specialties: Collaborative law, mediation and real estate law Birthplace: Richmond Education: Virginia Tech, bachelor’s degree; University of Richmond, law degree Spouse: Harrison Hobbies or pastimes: Traveling, hiking, swimming, boating, fishing, reading First job as a lawyer: Working with a sole practitioner, Mac Chenault. Fan of: Virginia Tech Hokies, University of Richmond Spiders Favorite vacation spot: Italy or any beach Recently read books: “A Land More Kind Than Home” by Wiley Cash and “The Round House” by Louise Erdrich Career mentors: “John G. ‘Chip’ Dicks III, who taught me the legal and business sides of practicing law and the Hon. Ernest P. Gates, who demonstrated how to blend faith, kindness and toughness.” What trends are you seeing in family law? “In the last few years, I have found that clients are more willing to engage mental health professionals to assist them with developing a parenting plan rather than taking the custody and visitation matters to the court for a decision. I believe that utilizing a mental health expert can assist the parents with making more informed decisions about their child’s best interests, which certainly benefits the child moving forward. Utilizing a mental health professional can also diffuse some of the anger that parents have with each other, which also leads to a better future for the family as a whole.” You have been trained as a collaborative lawyer. What role does a collaborative lawyer play in family law? “As a collaboratively trained attorney, I have an even greater ability to help couples who are dissolving their marriage or relationship in a respectful and dignified manner. In a collaborative case, we assemble a team of professionals in the legal, mental health and financial fields to assist the couple with the dissolution of their union. The collaborative practice is truly different from litigation; it provides a couple with the opportunity to be heard, create their own resolution and honor one another for the contributions the other has made during their union as a parent, spouse or partner.” 58
DECEMBER 2013
Photo Photo by by Mark Mark Rhodes Rhodes
2013 Virginia Legal Elite Stewart Lee Gitler Welsh Flaxman & Gitler LLC Alexandria
Dana D. McDaniel Spotts Fain PC Richmond
Stephen Evans Story Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
LABOR/ EMPLOYMENT
Robert Page Henley III Hirschler Fleischer Richmond
Christopher John Mugel Kaufman & Canoles PC Richmond
Ralph Marion Tener McCandlish & Lillard PC Fairfax
Thomas R. Bagby Woods Rogers PLC Roanoke
David Ian Tenzer Glenn Feldmann Darby & Goodlatte Roanoke
Robert Jon Barry Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
Robin L. Teskin LeClairRyan Alexandria
Eric James Berghold McCandlish & Lillard PC Fairfax
Ian Donald Titley Schroder Fidlow PLC Richmond
Lisa Ann Bertini Bertini & Hammer PC Norfolk
Jane Dandridge Tucker Vandeventer Black LLP Norfolk
Anne Graham Bibeau Vandeventer Black LLP Norfolk
Robert M. Tyler Spotts Fain PC Richmond
Susan R. Blake Dominion Enterprises Norfolk
Peter Joseph Van Bergen Peter J. Van Bergen, Patent Attorney Williamsburg
Elaine Charlson Bredehoft Charlson Bredehoft Cohen & Brown PC Reston
Mark W. Wasserman Reed Smith LLP Falls Church
John Michael Bredehoft Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
Timothy Hsieh MH2 Technology Law Group LLP Tysons Corner R. Neal Keesee Jr. Woods Rogers PLC Roanoke
Craig Lawrence Mytelka Williams Mullen Virginia Beach Brad R. Newberg Reed Smith LLP Falls Church
Paul Kilmer Holland & Knight LLP Washington
Stephen E. Noona Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
Lee N. Kump Sourcing Law Group PLC Chesterfield Timothy John Lockhart Willcox & Savage PC Norfolk Christopher Michael Mackenzie Jones, Blechman, Woltz & Kelly PC Newport News Jason E. Manning Troutman Sanders LLP Virginia Beach J. Michael Martinez de Andino Hunton & Williams Richmond
Kevin T. Oliveira Odin, Feldman & Pittleman PC Reston William Rueger Poynter Williams Mullen Norfolk Brian Charles Riopelle McGuireWoods LLP Richmond Matthew Robertson Sheldon Reed Smith LLP Falls Church Robert E. Smartschan Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
Edward T. White LeClairRyan Richmond
Congratulates
David Christopher Burton Williams Mullen Virginia Beach
Congratulations to colleagues Ron Tweel, Ed Lowry, and Jim Cox for being named LEGAL ELITE of Virginia.
Family, Domestic Relations
Civil Litigation
Susan M. Hicks Three Flint Hill 3201 Jermantown Road, Suite 200 Fairfax, Virginia 22030
Tel: 703-691-4848 Fax: 703-359-0197 Visit our website at www.susanhicksgroup.com www.VirginiaBusiness.com
Taxes, Estates, Trusts 500 Court Square Charlottesville, Va 22902 (434) 951-7200 (800) 451-1288 MichieHamlett.com VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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2013 Virginia Legal Elite
HEALTH LAW
Thomas W. Greeson Reed Smith LLP Falls Church Title: Partner Other specialties: Practice focuses on representation of diagnostic radiology groups and other providers of diagnostic imaging services across the country, with clients in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Hometown: Dalton, Ga. Education: University of Georgia, bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business administration; Chicago-Kent College of Law, law degree with honors Spouse: Catherine S. Read Children: “My daughter, Emma Greeson, is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, San Diego; and my son, Matthew Greeson, is a recent U.Va. Law School grad and a second-year associate in the D.C. offices of the law firm of Vinson & Elkins.” Pastimes: Politics and volunteering with nonprofits. He is a member and past-chair of the Virginia Bar Association’s Health Law Section Council. First job as lawyer: General counsel for the American College of Radiology Fan of: “Proud University of Georgia football fan. Go Dawgs!” Recently read book: “The Price of Justice” by Lawrence Leamer Career mentors: “Dr. Edward Meeker, U.Ga. economics professor. I served as Ted’s teaching assistant for two years while in graduate school getting an MBA. Paul Gebhard, a truly great health-care and association lawyer, who represented numerous national medical specialty societies in the course of his stellar career. Both are deceased and both are missed.” Can you describe your practice? “I focus on the regulatory issues confronting diagnostic radiologists and imaging suppliers. The regulatory framework promulgated by CMS for the provision and payment of diagnostic imaging services is complex and ever changing. I represent my clients not only in respect to regulatory compliance, but also with their ventures and their various contractual arrangements. I write for and speak frequently to groups in the imaging space on regulatory developments.” 60
DECEMBER 2013
Photo Photo by by Mark Mark Rhodes Rhodes
2013 Virginia Legal Elite Harris D. Butler III Butler Royals PLC Richmond
Robyn Hylton Hansen Jones, Blechman, Woltz & Kelly PC Newport News
Christopher Michael Michalik McGuireWoods LLP Richmond
Jeremy D. Capps Harman Claytor Corrigan & Wellman Richmond
Warren David Harless Christian & Barton LLP Richmond
Melisa Gay Michelsen Litten & Sipe LLP Harrisonburg
Jeremy Ethridge Carroll Glenn Feldmann Darby & Goodlatte Roanoke
Edward Lee Isler Isler Dare PC Vienna
Heather Ann Mullen Office of the City Attorney Norfolk
David E. Constine III Troutman Sanders LLP Richmond
Stephanie Ploszay Karn Goodman Allen & Filetti PLLC Glen Allen
David Edward Nagle Jackson Lewis LLP Richmond
Craig Juraj Curwood Curwood Law Firm Richmond
Scott W. Kezman Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
Susan Childers North LeClairRyan Williamsburg
Malik K. Cutlar PCT Law Group PLLC Alexandria
Arlene Faith Klinedinst Vandeventer Black LLP Norfolk
Samantha Stecker Otero McCandlish Holton PC Richmond
Kimberly W. Daniel Hancock, Daniel, Johnson & Nagle PC Glen Allen
David Aaron Kushner Willcox & Savage PC Norfolk
W. David Paxton Gentry Locke Rakes & Moore Roanoke
Lauren Rachel Darden Wharton Aldhizer & Weaver PLC Harrisonburg
Vijay Kumar Mago LeClairRyan Richmond
Lauren M. Piana Odin, Feldman & Pittleman PC Reston
R. Mark Dare Isler Dare PC Vienna
Alexander Tevis Marshall Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart PC Richmond
Adam Seth Rafal Vandeventer Black LLP Norfolk
John Edward Davidson Davidson & Kitzmann PLC Charlottesville
Kevin Edward Martingayle Bischoff Martingayle PC Virginia Beach
Sara Berg Rafal Williams Mullen Virginia Beach
Mary Elizabeth Davis Spotts Fain PC Richmond
James Vincent Meath Williams Mullen Richmond
Jeffrey Lynn Rhodes Albo & Oblon LLP Arlington
C. Michael DeCamps Sands Anderson PC Richmond
V&FN
Thomas Joseph Dillon III Hirschler Fleischer Richmond Karen Ann Doner Roth Doner Jackson PLC McLean Karen S. Elliott Sands Anderson PC Richmond Patricia Kyle Epps Hunton & Williams Richmond Reid H. Ervin Reid H. Ervin & Associates PC Norfolk William McCardell Furr Willcox & Savage PC Norfolk Sean M. Gibbons Roth Doner Jackson Gibbons Condlin PLC Richmond Ryan Ayers Glasgow Hunton & Williams Richmond David John Gogal Blankingship & Keith PC Fairfax Betty Sinclaire Wommack Graumlich Reed Smith LLP Richmond
VANDERPOOL, FROSTICK & NISHANIAN, P.C.
Solutions from lawyers you trust
Congratulations TO OUR AT TORNEYS NAMED
Legal Elite Michael R. Vanderpool - BUSINESS LAW Randolph D. Frostick - CIVIL LITIGATION Christopher M. Collins - INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
www.vfnlaw.com
MANASSAS • FREDERICKSBURG • LAKE RIDGE
703.369.4738 • 540.479.4275 • 703.492.9955 www.VirginiaBusiness.com
VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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2013 Virginia Legal Elite
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Marshall M. Curtis Whitham, Curtis, Christofferson & Cook PC Reston Title: President Birthplace: Charlottesville Education: Washington University in St. Louis, bachelor’s degree; Columbus School of Law, Catholic University of America, law degree Spouse: Eileen D. Curtis Children: Erin Melissa Curtis-Legate, J. Alexandra Curtis, Caitlin Elisabeth Miles Hobbies or pastimes: Cooking, photography, music First job as a lawyer: Senior Primary Examiner, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Recently read book: “Atlantic” by Simon Winchester Career mentors: “Law: Thomas A. Robinson and C. Lamont Whitham; engineering: Harvey Carpenter Jr., Dr. Lloyd R. Brown, Dr. R.J.W. Koopman and every inventor I have represented.” What insight does your background as a patent Examiner with the USPTO give you in your practice? “Having been an Examiner for over 20 years, I believe I can think like an Examiner in my writing of applications, drafting claims and presenting persuasive arguments to Examiners. Being able to anticipate, to a degree, how an Examiner will approach particular subject matter or react to the way it is described and claimed can often expedite prosecution of patent applications and result in better patent protection for clients’ inventions.” Do you expect China to overtake the U.S. in the issuance of “invention” patents? “I expect that closely approaching U.S. numbers is more likely than greatly exceeding them. The number of issued patents will be a percentage of applications filed which will include a large number of foreign origin, including the U.S. Increased numbers of applications filed in a given country is, in turn, an indicator of worldwide perception of increased ability to enforce patents, licensing value of patents and likelihood of infringement in that country.” 62
DECEMBER 2013
Photo Photo by by Mark Mark Rhodes Rhodes
2013 Virginia Legal Elite Timothy M. Richardson Poole Mahoney PC Virginia Beach
Alex Ross Gulotta Legal Aid Justice Center Charlottesville
Alton L. Knighton Jr. Woods Rogers PLC Roanoke
Gregory Branch Robertson Hunton & Williams Richmond
Margaret F. Hardy Sands Anderson PC Richmond
Laura Liff McCandlish & Lillard PC Fairfax
Anne Rocktashel Welter Law Firm PC Herndon
Nicole J. Harrell Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
Henry W. McLaughlin III Law Office of Henry McLaughlin Richmond
R. Barry Rowell Valverde and Rowell PC Virginia Beach
George H. Hettrick Hunton & Williams Richmond
Lauren Danielle Mehosky Legal Aid Society of Eastern Virginia Norfolk
Marguerite R. “Rita” Ruby Hunton & Williams Richmond
Phyllis C. Katz Sands Anderson PC Richmond
David Storey Mercer MercerTrigiani Alexandria
Rodney Allen Satterwhite McGuireWoods LLP Richmond James H. Shoemaker Jr. Patten, Wornom, Hatten & Diamonstein Newport News David Raymond Simonsen Jr. David Raymond Simonsen Jr., Attorney Richmond Anna Richardson Smith Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk Neil S. Talegaonkar ThompsonMcMullan PC Richmond Thamer E. “Chip” Temple III DurretteCrump PLC Richmond
Law Offices
Sevila, Saunders, Huddleston & White Congratulations to our 2013 Virginia Business
Legal Elite
JEANINE M. IRVING - APPELLATE LAW CRAIG E. WHITE - ALTERNATIVE DISPUTE RESOLUTION/MEDIATION LAWRENCE M. SCHONBERGER - REAL ESTATE/LAND USE R. PENN BAIN - YOUNG LAWYER (UNDER 40) RICHARD R. SAUNDERS, JR. - CIVIL LITIGATION ROBERT E. SEVILA - BUSINESS LAW WILLIAM R. FITZPATRICK - CRIMINAL LAW 30 NORTH KING STREET • LEESBURG, VIRGINIA 20176 (703) 777-5700 • METRO (703) 471-9800 • FAX (703) 771-4161 • www.sshw.com
Thomas E. Ullrich Wharton Aldhizer & Weaver PLC Harrisonburg Hill B. Wellford Jr. Hunton & Williams Richmond Cathleen Patricia Welsh Lenhart Obenshain PC Harrisonburg Burt Helgaas Whitt Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
Spotts Fain salutes all the lawyers named in Virginia Business’ 2013 Legal Elite including our own!
Laura Denise Windsor Williams Mullen Richmond
LEGAL SERVICES/ PRO BONO Arlene Kafker Beckerman Northern Virginia Pro Bono Law Center Fairfax
Hugh H h Fain F i
Betsy Davis B D i
Brian B i Marron M
Tara Louise Casey Carrico Center for Pro Bono Service University of Richmond School of Law Michael S. Dingman Reed Smith LLP Falls Church Lewis Eric Gelobter Legal Services of Northern VA Leesburg Billy B Bil l Mauck M k
Laura Geringer Gross Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
Dana M D McDaniel D i l
Meade M d Spotts S
Rob R bT Tyler l
411 East Franklin Street, Suite 600 | Richmond, VA 23219 | 804.697.2000 | www.spottsfain.com www.VirginiaBusiness.com
VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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2013 Virginia Legal Elite
LABOR/EMPLOYMENT
Lisa A. Bertini Bertini & Hammer PC Norfolk Title: President Other legal specialties: Personal injury, contract litigation Birthplace: Vineland, N.J. Education: Georgetown University, bachelor’s degree; College of William & Mary, law degree Spouse: Dr. Jack L. Siegel Children: Two teenage girls: Zoe and Lucy Hobbies or pastimes: Avid fiction reader, dog lover, hiking, travel First job as a lawyer: Jenkens & Gilchrist in Dallas Recently read book: “The Sweet In-between” by Sheri Reynolds Career mentors: “My dad, because he is both a frustrated trial lawyer and my loveliest critic; and Judge M.J. Hall, a great friend and brilliant jurist.” What trends are you seeing in discrimination and harassment cases? “Overall, there is a trend toward mediation over trial. This has gradually developed to the point where traditional Title VII employment trials are very rare in federal court in the [Eastern District of Virginia] Norfolk Division. I don’t necessarily see this as a negative if the case settles for the right reasons. I do consider it disheartening when legally strong cases are strained to consider settlement. So many cases are lost at the summary judgment level due to federal judges who take liberty with fact finding more appropriately reserved for juries. What I find impossible is that once a plaintiff jumps the countless hurdles she has to clear even to have a case worthy of filing under ever-changing standards, she then can see the finish line in sight with all discovery done, and a judge pulls one fact out of the morass and christens that fact to be the indispensible and paramount compass point for a reason known to no one but the judge. I doubt I’ll ever get used to that process and hope I never reconcile to its inherent unfairness.”
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DECEMBER 2013
Photo Photo by by Mark Mark Rhodes Rhodes
2013 Virginia Legal Elite Wiley Francis Mitchell Jr. Willcox & Savage PC Norfolk
M. Seth Ginther Hirschler Fleischer Richmond
Bryan Michael Haynes Troutman Sanders LLP Richmond
George Andrew Nea Jr. Williams Mullen Richmond
Ralph Martin Goldstein Jones, Blechman, Woltz & Kelly PC Newport News
Frederick Patterson Helm Kemper Consulting Richmond
Stephen “Steve” A. Northup* Troutman Sanders LLP Richmond
David Browning Graham Kaufman & Canoles PC Williamsburg
John Early Holloway Troutman Sanders LLP Norfolk
John Oakey Jr. McGuireWoods LLP Richmond
Brian R. Greene GreeneHurlocker PLC Richmond
William Scott Johnson Hancock, Daniel, Johnson & Nagle PC Glen Allen
Daniel Eric Ortiz Blankingship & Keith PC Fairfax
Anne Reilly Ha McCandlish & Lillard PC Fairfax
Reginald N. Jones Williams Mullen Richmond
John Robert Rellick Rappahannock Legal Services Inc. Tappahannock Travis Aaron Sabalewski Reed Smith LLP Richmond Marcellinus L. M. B. Slag Legal Aid Justice Center Richmond
We congratulate our attorneys who have been recognized by their peers as Virginia’s Legal Elite for 2013.
Edwin Ford Stephens Christian & Barton LLP Richmond James L. Weinberg Hirschler Fleischer Richmond John Edward Whitfield Blue Ridge Legal Services Inc. Harrisonburg Leigh M. Winstead Odin, Feldman & Pittleman PC Reston Henry L. Woodward Legal Aid Society of Roanoke Valley Roanoke
LEGISLATIVE/ REGULATORY/ ADMINISTRATIVE
Bruce E. Arkema
Thamer E. Temple III
R. Paul Childress, Jr.
Beverley L. Crump
Wyatt B. Durrette
www.durrettecrump.com
Hampton Roads Community Foundation congratulates Robert C. Goodman Jr. of Kaufman & Canoles PC 2013 winner of the Barron F. Black Community Builder Award
Heidi Wilson Abbott Hunton & Williams Richmond Ralph L. “Bill” Axselle Jr. Williams Mullen Richmond
Previous recipients honored for helping clients to be generous: 2012 Toy D. Savage Jr., Willcox Savage PC 2011 Anne B. Shumadine, Signature 2010 Allan G. Donn, Willcox & Savage PC 2009 Guilford D. Ware, Crenshaw, Ware and Martin PLC 2008 Robert C. Nusbaum, Williams Mullen 2007 Anita O. Poston, Vandeventer Black LLP
Stephen E. Baril Sands Anderson PC Richmond Gerald Clyde Canaan II Hancock, Daniel, Johnson & Nagle PC Glen Allen Kenneth Eric Chadwick Chadwick, Washington, Moriarity, Elmore & Bunn PC Fairfax David Wright Clarke Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott LLC Richmond Whittington W. Clement Hunton & Williams Richmond M. Ann Neil Cosby Sands Anderson PC Richmond * Retired
Inspiring Philanthropy. Changing Lives.
hamptonroadscf.org www.VirginiaBusiness.com
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(757) 622-7951 VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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2013 Virginia Legal Elite
LEGAL SERVICES/PRO BONO
Phyllis C. Katz Sands Anderson PC Richmond Title: Shareholder Other legal specialties: Employment, government and nonprofit law Birthplace: Elizabeth, N.J. Education: Douglass College, Rutgers University, bachelor’s degree; Ohio University, master’s in urban and regional planning; University of Richmond, law degree Children: A daughter and son, their spouses and five grandchildren Hobbies or pastimes: “Inventing food recipes; teaching/coaching/mentoring; exploring new venues and neighborhoods; traveling unfrequented paths.” First job as a lawyer: Office of Attorney General of Virginia Favorite vacation spot: Aspen and its music festival; Paris; Crete Recently read book: “Five Miles Away, A World Apart” by James E. Ryan Career mentors: “There are so many that selecting a few would be a disservice to the others. One person who has been an inspiration and a collaborator is Ann Hodges (co-founder of the Legal Information Network for Cancer) — without her I would not be asked these questions.” You are a co-founder of LINC. What is LINC’s purpose and how did it get started? “LINC was created to (1) advocate for persons with cancer who were experiencing adverse consequences arising from their cancer treatments and recovery and (2) provide easy access to attorneys knowledgeable in the issues and willing to take on the representation at the drop of a hat. In the mid-1990s many of the current standard treatments for cancer were denied coverage as being ‘experimental’ or ‘not medically necessary’ (such as reconstruction after breast cancer surgery). Financial issues and creditor actions plagued (and still do) cancer patients — a diagnosis of cancer is costly — lost time from work, no income, and huge medical expenses. Cancer patients in hospice found themselves needing guardianship for their minor children. The vision of energizing attorneys to volunteer their time and knowledge to help cancer patients deal with the legal issues that impacted their recovery has always been the goal of LINC. Since 1996 LINC has served hundreds of patients a year to effectively deal with non-medical impacts of cancer.”
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DECEMBER 2013
Photo Photo by by Mark Mark Rhodes Rhodes
2013 Virginia Legal Elite John-Garrett Kemper Kemper Consulting Richmond Anne Leigh Kerr Troutman Sanders LLP Richmond Bradford A. King Sands Anderson PC Richmond Lane Kneedler Reed Smith LLP Richmond Kamala Hallgren Lannetti Virginia Beach City Attorney’s Office Virginia Beach Marina J. Liacouras Elizabeth River Crossings Portsmouth Thomas Alan Lisk Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott LLC Richmond J. Jay Litten Litten & Sipe LLP Harrisonburg
Congratulations to our lawyers, David A. Oblon, Jeffrey L. Rhodes, Michael C. May, Cyrus E. Phillips, IV, and Jeffrey A. Hord on their selection as five of Virginia’s “Legal Elite.” A classic litigation law firm, Albo & Oblon, practices Employment Law, Government Contracts, Business/Civil Litigation, ABC Law, Family Law, and Criminal Defense. We accept cases anywhere in Virginia, Washington, D.C. and Maryland.
Alexander Macdonald Macaulay Macaulay & Burtch PC Richmond Dale G. Mullen McGuireWoods LLP Richmond Edward Augustus Mullen Reed Smith LLP Richmond Collins Leonard Owens Jr. City Attorney’s Office Newport News Bernard Anthony Pishko Norfolk City Attorney’s Office Norfolk Joan Heishman Proper William B. Reichhardt & Associates Fairfax Paul R. Schmidt Poole Mahoney PC Virginia Beach Stephen C. Shannon Odin, Feldman & Pittleman PC Reston Mark Campbell Shuford Spencer LLP Richmond Elizabeth Skilling Harman Claytor Corrigan & Wellman Richmond Meade A. Spotts Spotts Fain PC Richmond Joseph E. Spruill III LeClairRyan Richmond Daniel Clayton Summerlin Woods Rogers PLC Roanoke David Harlen Sump Troutman Sanders LLP Norfolk
Arlington - Fairfax - Staunton (703) 312-0410 Web: www.albo-oblon.com • Email: law@albo-oblon.com
The law firm of Sacks & Sacks congratulates Andrew M. Sacks for his selection again this year for the “LEGAL ELITE” in the category of Criminal Defense. Andrew is a partner with his father, Stanley, in their Norfolk law firm, Sacks & Sacks. Founded in 1911 by the late Herman A. Sacks, the firm’s three generations of trial lawyers have been representing clients in the state and federal courts in Virginia continuously for over 100 years. Andrew, a summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Dartmouth College, received his law degree from the University of Virginia, where he served on the law school’s National Moot Court team. For the past 33 years, he has concentrated on plaintiff’s injury, civil rights personal injury, and wrongful death trial law, and criminal defense work in state and federal court. A Past President of the Virginia Trial Lawyers Association, a Past Co-chair of the Virginia Criminal Justice Conference, a Fellow of the International Academy of Trial Lawyers, and a Past President of the Virginia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Andrew has been listed in The Best Lawyers in America editions since 1993, and appears in the 2013 edition in the categories of both White-Collar and Non-White-Collar Criminal Defense, as well as Personal Injury Litigation. He was also recently selected as the White Collar Criminal Defense Lawyer of the Year for the Norfolk area by Best Lawyers. Active in community affairs, Andrew was a founding member of the Norfolk Aids Walk For Life Foundation, and he formerly chaired the Virginia Anti-Defamation League.
SACKS & SACKS, A Professional Corporation Attorneys & Counselors at Law
757-623-2753 • Town Point Center, Suite 501, 150 Boush St. • Norfolk,VA 23510 andrewsacks@lawfirmofsacksandsacks.com
Continuing a Family Tradition of Trial Law Since 1911 www.VirginiaBusiness.com
VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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2013 Virginia Legal Elite
LEGISLATIVE/REGULATORY/ ADMINISTRATIVE
Dale G. Mullen McGuireWoods LLP Richmond
Title: Partner Other legal specialties: Environmental law, civil litigation, land use, natural resources, public utilities, animal agriculture Birthplace: Danville, Ill. Education: Bluefield College, bachelor’s degree (summa cum laude); University of Richmond, T.C. Williams School of Law, law degree (cum laude) Spouse: Victoria Children: Jacob, 19; Thomas, 15 Hobbies or pastimes: “Playing music with my sons and enjoying the Virginia outdoors.” First job as a lawyer: “When I was still in law school, Jim Comey helped me get a position at a firm that represented businesses, health-care providers, and other professionals. I was placed on a trial team and this early experience was a tremendous opportunity to learn how to prepare complicated cases with expert testimony in a short period of time. Working under the scrutiny of clients, insurance companies, and experienced litigators taught me how to complete high-quality work efficiently, effectively and economically.” Fan of: Golf, camping, skiing, hunting, fishing Favorite vacation spot: Florida Keys or any Virginia ski resort Recently read book: “The Curmudgeons: South Georgia Stories of Risk and Redemption” by Tom Word Career mentors: “I am grateful to more mentors than I could mention. Chief among them are David E. Evans, John M. Fitzpatrick, James B. Comey, and John G. Douglass.” How has your experience in government contributed to your practice? “Businesses need workable solutions, not complicated disputes. My experience with the Office of the Attorney General, as a Special Assistant United States Attorney (SAUSA) and as a county attorney, provided the opportunity to participate in a variety of disputes including complex federal, state and local matters. Understanding the role of litigation and the legislative, regulatory and enforcement component of each segment of government helps me see the opportunities for practical environmental and regulatory solutions for business clients.”
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Photo Photo by by Mark Mark Rhodes Rhodes
2013 Virginia Legal Elite William G. Thomas Reed Smith LLP Richmond
John V. Cogbill III McGuireWoods LLP Richmond
Warren Lafayette Tisdale Willcox & Savage PC Norfolk
Thomas J. Colucci Walsh Colucci Lubeley Emrich & Walsh PC Arlington
Anthony F. Troy Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott LLC Richmond
Andrew M. Condlin Roth Doner Jackson Gibbons Condlin PLC Richmond
Karen C. Fagelson Reed Smith LLP Falls Church
Daniel Richard Weckstein Vandeventer Black LLP Norfolk
Ann Kiley Crenshaw Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
David Young Faggert Faggert & Frieden PC Virginia Beach
REAL ESTATE/ LAND USE
David Conlon Culbert Culbert & Schmitt PLLC Leesburg
John William Farrell McCandlish & Lillard PC Fairfax
Steven Ray Adcox Ferguson Enterprises Inc. Newport News
Paul Harold Davenport Hirschler Fleischer Richmond
Christopher Ambrosio Vandeventer Black LLP Norfolk
John Holland Foote Walsh Colucci Lubeley Emrich & Walsh PC Prince William
Robert L. Dewey Willcox & Savage PC Norfolk
Michael A. Banzhaf Reed Smith LLP Falls Church
Robert Michael Diamond Reed Smith LLP Falls Church
Robert Edward Bourdon Jr. Sykes, Bourdon, Ahern & Levy PC Virginia Beach Deborah Mancoll Casey Vandeventer Black LLP Norfolk
Alyssa Carducci Embree Williams Mullen Norfolk
Christopher Martin Gill Christian & Barton LLP Richmond
Benjamin William Emerson Sands Anderson PC Richmond
Donald N. Goldrosen Odin, Feldman & Pittleman PC Reston Maryellen F. Goodlatte Glenn Feldmann Darby & Goodlatte Roanoke Howard Elliott Gordon Williams Mullen Norfolk Sarah E. Hall Blankingship & Keith PC Fairfax
Jonathan Aaron Frank Williams Mullen Richmond Vernon Meredith Geddy III Geddy, Harris, Franck & Hickman LLP Williamsburg
Matthew Michael Dudley Willcox & Savage PC Norfolk
Paul Whitmore Gerhardt Kaufman & Canoles PC Williamsburg
Lisa Anne Hawkins Lenhart Obenshain PC Harrisonburg Alexander Brooks Hock Williams Mullen Richmond Edward Falcon Hodges Jr. Clement & Wheatley Danville Carol C. Honigberg Reed Smith LLP Falls Church David S. Houston Reed Smith LLP Falls Church
STAND YOUR GROUND Our employment lawyers are known for their superior skill and knowledge... Č&#x2C6; Â&#x2021;Â&#x2019;Â&#x201D;Â&#x2021;Â&#x2022;Â&#x2021;Â?Â&#x2013;Â&#x2039;Â?Â&#x2030; Â&#x2021;Â?Â&#x2019;Â&#x17D;Â&#x2018;Â&#x203A;Â&#x2021;Â&#x2021;Â&#x2022; Â&#x2039;Â? Â&#x2039;Â?Â&#x2020;Â&#x2039;Â&#x2DC;Â&#x2039;Â&#x2020;Â&#x2014;Â&#x192;Â&#x17D;ÇĄ Â?Â&#x2014;Â&#x17D;Â&#x2013;Â&#x2039;ÇŚÂ&#x2019;Â&#x17D;Â&#x192;Â&#x2039;Â?Â&#x2013;Â&#x2039;Â&#x2C6;Â&#x2C6;ÇĄ Â&#x192;Â?Â&#x2020; Â&#x2026;Â&#x17D;Â&#x192;Â&#x2022;Â&#x2022; Â&#x2021;Â?Â&#x2019;Â&#x17D;Â&#x2018;Â&#x203A;Â?Â&#x2021;Â?Â&#x2013; Â&#x17D;Â&#x2039;Â&#x2013;Â&#x2039;Â&#x2030;Â&#x192;Â&#x2013;Â&#x2039;Â&#x2018;Â?Ǥ Č&#x2C6; Â&#x2018;Â?ÇŚÂ&#x2026;Â&#x2018;Â?Â&#x2019;Â&#x2021;Â&#x2013;Â&#x2039;Â&#x2013;Â&#x2039;Â&#x2018;Â?Č&#x20AC;Â?Â&#x2018;Â?ÇŚÂ&#x2022;Â&#x2018;Â&#x17D;Â&#x2039;Â&#x2026;Â&#x2039;Â&#x2013;Â&#x192;Â&#x2013;Â&#x2039;Â&#x2018;Â? Â&#x2026;Â&#x2018;Â&#x2DC;Â&#x2021;Â?Â&#x192;Â?Â&#x2013;Â&#x2022;ÇĄ Â&#x2022;Â&#x2021;Â&#x2DC;Â&#x2021;Â&#x201D;Â&#x192;Â?Â&#x2026;Â&#x2021;ÇĄ Â&#x2020;Â&#x2021;Â&#x2C6;Â&#x192;Â?Â&#x192;Â&#x2013;Â&#x2039;Â&#x2018;Â?ÇĄ Â&#x192;Â?Â&#x2020; Â&#x201E;Â&#x2014;Â&#x2022;Â&#x2039;Â?Â&#x2021;Â&#x2022;Â&#x2022; Â&#x2013;Â&#x2018;Â&#x201D;Â&#x2013;Â&#x2022;Ǥ Č&#x2C6; Â&#x2018;Â&#x2026;Â&#x192;Â&#x17D; Â&#x192;Â?Â&#x2020; Â&#x192;Â&#x2022;Â&#x2022;Â&#x2018;Â&#x2026;Â&#x2039;Â&#x192;Â&#x2013;Â&#x2021;Â&#x2020; Â&#x2026;Â&#x2018;Â&#x2014;Â?Â&#x2022;Â&#x2021;Â&#x17D; Â&#x2022;Â&#x2021;Â&#x201D;Â&#x2DC;Â&#x2039;Â&#x2026;Â&#x2021;Â&#x2022; Â&#x2039;Â? Â&#x2026;Â&#x2018;Â?Â&#x2019;Â&#x17D;Â&#x2021;Â&#x161; Â&#x2C6;Â&#x2021;Â&#x2020;Â&#x2021;Â&#x201D;Â&#x192;Â&#x17D; Â&#x17D;Â&#x2039;Â&#x2013;Â&#x2039;Â&#x2030;Â&#x192;Â&#x2013;Â&#x2039;Â&#x2018;Â?ÇĄ Â&#x2039;Â?Â&#x2026;Â&#x17D;Â&#x2014;Â&#x2020;Â&#x2039;Â?Â&#x2030; Â&#x2019;Â&#x192;Â&#x2013;Â&#x2021;Â?Â&#x2013; Â&#x2039;Â?Â&#x2C6;Â&#x201D;Â&#x2039;Â?Â&#x2030;Â&#x2021;Â?Â&#x2021;Â?Â&#x2013; Â&#x192;Â?Â&#x2020; Â&#x2026;Â&#x17D;Â&#x192;Â&#x2022;Â&#x2022; Â&#x192;Â&#x2026;Â&#x2013;Â&#x2039;Â&#x2018;Â?Â&#x2022;Ǥ
Harris Butler
Rebecca Royals
Zev Antell
Paul Falabella
Recent representations include collective actions representing police ofĎ&#x201D;icers with the City of Richmond and Henrico County Police Departments and with the Richmond Sheriffâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Department to recover unpaid overtime wages. Butler Royals, PLC â&#x20AC;˘ 140 Virginia Street â&#x20AC;˘ Suite 302 â&#x20AC;˘ Richmond, VA 23219
804 â&#x20AC;˘ 648 â&#x20AC;˘ 4848
visit our website at www.butlerroyals.com www.VirginiaBusiness.com
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REAL ESTATE/LAND USE
Thomas J. Colucci Walsh Colucci Lubeley Emrich & Walsh PC
Arlington Title: Principal Birthplace: Waterbury, Conn. Education: Fairfield University, bachelor’s degree in economics; Washington College of Law of the American University, law degree Spouse: Michelle Children: Troy, Jill Hobbies or pastimes: Golf, fitness and spending time with grandchildren First job as a lawyer: Associate at Herrell, Campbell & Lawson (small general practice firm in Arlington) Fan of: Washington Redskins and Washington Nationals Favorite vacation spot: South Florida Recently read book: “Killing Lincoln” by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard Career mentors: Barnes Lawson, Paul Herrell, Eugene House and Preston Caruthers Is the Virginia commercial real estate market reviving? “The Virginia market is showing clear signs of revival with a great amount of activity on multifamily, residential projects located in strategic locations along metro corridors in Arlington and in the Merrifield submarkets and now, with the shortly anticipated opening of the Silver Line through the Tysons Corner area, at those locations proximate to stations on the Silver Line. The office market remains somewhat sluggish, and I would anticipate that may continue until there is a little more stability brought to bear on anticipated government spending.” What trends are you seeing in real estate law? “There is clearly a movement to large-scale, mixed-use projects in convenient locations that are able to provide a wide array of amenities for work, play and shopping opportunities. These projects seem to have very complex legal structures, as oftentimes there may be separate development interests developing separate portions of a mixeduse project based on their development expertise in a particular class of asset. These types of projects present many ownership, development and financing challenges. However, the development and lending community is generally becoming more accustomed to these types of arrangements as these are the types of things that are needed in order to co-exist in a vibrant urban setting.” 70
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Photo Photo by by Mark Mark Rhodes Rhodes
2013 Virginia Legal Elite James Lewis Johnson Wharton Aldhizer & Weaver PLC Harrisonburg James Webb Jones Poole Mahoney PC Chesapeake Donnie Brennen Keene McGuireWoods LLP Richmond Neil Stanton Kessler Troutman Sanders LLP Richmond Charles Edwards Land Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk Daniel Frank Layman Jr. Daniel F. Layman, Jr., Attorney at Law Roanoke
Thomas Tinsley Palmer Woods Rogers PLC Roanoke Charles Wayne Payne Jr. Hirschler Fleischer Fredericksburg Susan M. Pesner Pesner Kawamoto PLC McLean
TAXES/ ESTATES/ TRUSTS/ELDER LAW Maureen C. Ackerly Armstrong Bristow Farley & Schwarzschild PLC Richmond Farhad Aghdami Williams Mullen Richmond
Charles H. Rothenberg Hirschler Fleischer Richmond
Hugh Taylor Antrim ThompsonMcMullan PC Richmond
Lawrence Mason Schonberger Sevila, Saunders, Huddleston & White PC Leesburg
Jean Galloway Ball Jean Galloway Ball PLC Fairfax
Conway H. Sheild III Jones, Blechman, Woltz & Kelly PC Newport News
Benjamin Douglas Leigh Atwill, Troxell & Leigh PC Leesburg
James Rawleigh Simmons Dunton, Simmons & Dunton LLP White Stone
James B. Lonergan Pender & Coward Virginia Beach
Jeffrey Manss Stedfast Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
Dennis Irl Belcher McGuireWoods LLP Richmond Craig Dennis Bell McGuireWoods LLP Richmond Fred J. Bernhardt Jr. FloranceGordonBrown PC Richmond
Congratulations to the Christian & Barton attorneys selected as part of Virginia’s Legal Elite 2013.
David J. Brewer Odin, Feldman & Pittleman PC Reston
Howard Rufus Sykes Jr. Sykes, Bourdon, Ahern & Levy PC Virginia Beach
Peter E. Broadbent Jr.
Neal Paul Brodsky LeClairRyan Norfolk
Augustus C. Epps Jr.
James W. Theobold Hirschler Fleischer Richmond
L. Ashley Brooks Jones, Jones & Dunn PLC Chesapeake
James David Thornton Thornton & Associates PLC Glen Allen
James William C. Canup Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
C. Grice McMullan Jr. ThompsonMcMullan PC Richmond
Timothy Old Trant II Kaufman & Canoles PC Newport News
John B. Catlett Jr. Sands Anderson PC Richmond
John M. Mercer Williams Mullen Richmond
Lucia Anna Trigiani MercerTrigiani Alexandria
Deborah Donick Cochran Cochran & Owen LLC Vienna
Adam Russell Nelson ThompsonMcMullan PC Richmond
Susan Truskey Chadwick, Washington, Moriarity, Elmore & Bunn PC Fairfax
Michael Richard Newby Hancock, Daniel, Johnson & Nagle PC Glen Allen
William Arthur Walsh Jr. Hunton & Williams Richmond
Valerie Wagner Long Williams Mullen Charlottesville Brian Richard Marron Spotts Fain PC Richmond John Fitzgerald McManus Hirschler Fleischer Fredericksburg
RJ Nutter II Troutman Sanders LLP Virginia Beach Carrie Hallberg O’Malley Hirschler Fleischer Fredericksburg G. Michael Pace Jr. Gentry Locke Rakes & Moore Roanoke
Jay M. Weinberg Hirschler Fleischer Richmond Jay F. Wilks Wilks, Alper & Harwood PC Norfolk
James P. Cox III MichieHamlett Charlottesville Cary Z. Cucinelli The Ruddy Law Firm Fairfax C. Richard Davis Tax Counsel Ltd. Glen Allen Gregory Reid Davis Kaufman & Canoles PC Williamsburg
Christopher M. Gill W. David Harless R. Braxton Hill IV Jonathan M. Joseph Jennifer M. McLemore Craig T. Merritt Michael D. Mueller Michael W. Smith E. Ford Stephens Henry I. Willett III
Allan G. Donn Willcox & Savage PC Norfolk Matthew M. Farley Armstrong Bristow Farley & Schwarzschild PLC Richmond
www.VirginiaBusiness.com
www.cblaw.com Richmond, Virginia
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2013 Virginia Legal Elite
TAXES/ESTATES/ TRUSTS/ELDER LAW
Neil L. Rose Willcox & Savage PC Virginia Beach Title: Member Other legal specialties: Corporate, partnerships, LLCs, real estate Birthplace: Washington, D.C. Education: Bachelor’s degree, University of Virginia, McIntire School of Commerce, (with distinction, Beta Gamma Sigma); University of Virginia School of Law, law degree; Georgetown University Law Center, master of laws in taxation. Spouse: Regina (Gina) H. Rose Children: Frederick, Ryan and Jonathan Hobbies or pastimes: Charity work (including Guiding Eyes for the Blind); Norfolk Kiwanis member; president of the Virginia Beach Education Foundation First job as a lawyer: Special Honors Attorney, U.S. Department of the Treasury Fan of: University of Virginia Cavaliers Recently read book: Currently reading Larry Sabato’s “The Kennedy Half Century” Career mentors: Former U.Va. law professor Hank Gutman, Howard Spainhour, former partner Anne Shumadine What needs to be changed in the federal tax code? “We need to reduce the number of tax expenditures (tax credits/deductions) so we can raise the needed funds at a lower rate. The tax code should be simplified and focus on raising revenue at lower rates — not federal spending. The current approach is an inefficient way for Congress to spend money. A consumption tax with appropriate credits would more efficiently raise the funds needed to run our government.” Should the federal estate tax be abolished? “Although many people want to eliminate the federal estate tax, death is a good time to impose a tax. The real question is who should pay the tax and at what rate? The current exemption, slated to increase to $5,340,000 in January, means few Americans pay this confiscatory 40 percent tax. A very low estate tax rate applicable to more estates would be better policy — perhaps a rate of 1 to 5 percent beginning with estates of $500,000.” 72
DECEMBER 2013
Photo Photo by by Mark Mark Rhodes Rhodes
2013 Virginia Legal Elite John Warren Flora Lenhart Obenshain PC Harrisonburg
Thank You...
William S. Fralin The Estate Planning & Elder Law Firm PC Arlington Robert L. Freed Freed & Shepherd PC Richmond
for selecting me
12 yyears in a row!
LUIS A. ABREU, Attorney at Law Practice Areas: Family Law, Civil Litigation, Creditors Rights, Business Law
William Andrew Galanko Norfolk Southern Corp. Norfolk James Conrad Garcia Williams Mullen Richmond
P.O. Box 1598, 626 N. Ridge St., Danville, VA 24543 Tel: 434-791-4677 â&#x20AC;˘ Fax: 434-791-4676
J. William Gray Jr. Hunton & Williams Richmond Timothy Howard Guare Timothy H. Guare PLC Richmond Kristen Frances Hager McGuireWoods LLP Richmond Frances H. Hampton Poole Mahoney PC Virginia Beach Philip Lewelling Hatchett Kaufman & Canoles PC Newport News Anne Marie Heishman Dingman Labowitz PC Alexandria Patrick Wesley Herman Vandeventer Black LLP Norfolk R. Braxton Hill III Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk A. Everett Hoeg III Yates Campbell & Hoeg LLP Fairfax Andrew H. Hook Hook Law Center PC Virginia Beach Paul Gerard Izzo ThompsonMcMullan PC Richmond David Kamer Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk Kirkland M. Kelley Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk Julie A. King Julie A. King PLC Charlottesville David Scott Lionberger Hirschler Fleischer Richmond R. Shawn Majette ThompsonMcMullan PC Richmond Donald O. Manning Manning & Murray PC Arlington www.VirginiaBusiness.com
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2013 Virginia Legal Elite
YOUNG LAWYERS
Gretchen M. Ostroff Vandeventer Black LLP Norfolk Title: Senior associate Legal specialties: Construction law and litigation; professional liability defense of architects and engineers Birthplace: Wiesbaden, Germany Education: Virginia Tech, bachelor’s degree in civil and environmental engineering; University of Richmond, law degree (cum laude) Spouse: Ethan Children: Cecelia (8 months) Hobbies or pastimes: “Going to concerts; Pilates; taking our daughter, Cece, and dog, Fletch, on long walks.” First job as a lawyer: “I’ve been with my current firm since graduating from law school.” Fan of: Live music Favorite vacation spot: “Where we honeymooned: Biras Creek, British Virgin Islands.” Recently read book: “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Career mentors: Bill Franczek, Stephan Andrews, Patrick Genzler and Ethan Ostroff Why did you decide to become a lawyer? “After college, I worked as a civil engineer on a complex bridge construction project. When construction claims inevitably started rolling in, I assisted with the investigation and information gathering to respond to them, which eventually inspired me to apply to law school. Now, in light of my former life as an engineer, I understand the challenges that arise on construction projects and can relate to what my clients experience. I find helping design professionals avoid and handle claims particularly rewarding.” What advice do you have for students who will graduate this spring from law school? “Although salary is important — particularly in this economy — don’t overlook the intangibles that accompany any job, such as the opportunity to do meaningful work and the culture of the firm or office. You will likely spend the majority of your next 30 years at work — make sure you like the people you will be working with, because you will see them more than you see your family.” 74
DECEMBER 2013
Photo Photo by by Mark Mark Rhodes Rhodes
2013 Virginia Legal Elite Autumn D. McCullogh McCandlish & Lillard PC Fairfax
Dexter C. Rumsey III Rumsey & Bugg PC Irvington
John T. Tompkins III Jones, Blechman, Woltz & Kelly PC Newport News
Molly Delea McEvoy Armstrong Bristow Farley & Schwarzschild PLC Richmond
Gregory J. Rupert Reed Smith LLP Falls Church
Charles E. Troland Glenn Feldmann Darby & Goodlatte Roanoke
Daniel Lindsay Russell Norfolk Southern Corp. Norfolk
Elizabeth Munro von Keller von Keller Law PC Manassas
Bruce Lee Mertens Sands Anderson PC Richmond John Thomas Midgett Midgett & Preti PC Virginia Beach
Harry Peter Sakellaris Clement & Wheatley Danville
Richelle D. Moore Parrish, Houck & Snead PLC Fredericksburg
Alexander Irvine Saunders Woods Rogers PLC Roanoke
Elizabeth Chichester Morrogh Blankingship & Keith PC Fairfax
Jennifer Lee Schooley Schooley Law Firm PLC Richmond
Amy Grayson Pesesky Amy G. Pesesky PLC Norfolk Nancy Newton Rogers Virginia Estate & Trust Law PLC Richmond Neil Leslie Rose Willcox & Savage PC Virginia Beach William L. S. Rowe Hunton & Williams Richmond
Donald E. Showalter Wharton Aldhizer & Weaver PLC Harrisonburg Eugene Sim Sim Legal PC Fairfax Frank A. Thomas III Frank A. Thomas III PLC Orange E. Diane Thompson Pender & Coward Suffolk
YOUNG LAWYER (UNDER 40)
Nicholas V. Albu Woods Rogers PLC Charlottesville Rebecca Shwayder Aman Jones, Blechman, Woltz & Kelly PC Newport News
Eric Chen Chung Wang Reed Smith LLP Falls Church
Aaron James-Birch Ambrose Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
Mark Christopher Watson Hancock, Daniel, Johnson & Nagle PC Glen Allen
Catherine Christine Ayres Office of the Attorney General Richmond
Lewis Warrington Webb III Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
R. Penn Bain Sevila, Saunders, Huddleston & White PC Leesburg
David William Whitehead Virginia Estate & Trust Law PLC Richmond
Mollie Colleen Barton Batzli Stiles Butler PC Richmond
Darryl Duane Whitesell Edmunds & Williams PC Lynchburg
Patrick Dayton Blake Willcox & Savage PC Norfolk
Munford R. Yates Jr. Yates Campbell & Hoeg LLP Fairfax
Elaina L. Blanks-Green Norfolk Southern Corp. Norfolk Jason Alan Botkins Litten & Sipe LLP Harrisonburg
Congratulations to our 2013 Legal Elite!
David Arnold Civil Litigation
William Lascara Construction
www.pendercoward.com 757-490-3000
Mark Baumgartner Business Law
James Lonergan Real Estate/Land Use
Richard Garriott, Jr. Family/Domestic Relations
D. Rossen S. Greene Young Lawyer (under 40)
Jack Rephan Construction
E. Diane Thompson Taxes/Estates/Trusts/Elder Law
Established in 1889, Pender & Coward continues to provide quality legal services to individuals, governmental entities and businesses of all sizes. www.VirginiaBusiness.com
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In 1973, Tony Orlando and Dawn had the number one song of the year. And clients began to sing our praises. Our lawyers have been a hit with clients since our founding 40 years ago and weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re not letting up now. ThompsonMcMullan: hip to client needs since 1973.
www.t-mlaw.com 804 649 7545 100 Shockoe Slip | Richmond, Virginia 23219
2013 Virginia Legal Elite CowanGates
CowanGates
1930 Huguenot Road PO Box 35655 Richmond, Virginia 23235 804.320.9100 office 804.320.2950 fax CowanGates.com
1930 Huguenot Road PO Box 35655 Richmond, Virginia 23235 804.320.9100 office 804.320.2950 fax CowanGates.com
Frank N. Cowan
Frank Cowan is a founding member and Chairman of CowanGates, with extensive trial and litigation experience as well as mediation and arbitration. A Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, Cowan has been recognized in “The Best Lawyers in America,” “Virginia Business Legal Elite,” and “Virginia Super Lawyers,” among others.
Melanie Friend
Melanie Friend began practicing family law at CowanGates in 2007 and was named a principal at the firm in 2012. Friend was named a “Virginia Super Lawyers Rising Star” in 20102013 and was selected as the Richmond Bar Association’s 2013 Young Lawyer of the Year.
Franklin Solutions
Ferguson Walton & Shansab, PLLC
A Dispute Resolution Practice
12007 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 140 Reston, Virginia 20191 Phone: 703-860-8520 Fax: 703-860-1630 E-mail: yshansab@fergusonwalton.com Web: www.fergusonwalton.com Blog: www.vafiduciarylaw.com
2450 N. Powhatan Street Arlington, Virginia 22207 Phone: (703) 684-3550 Fax: (703) 533-8977 E-mail: jfranklin@franklinsolutions.net Web: www.franklinsolutions.net
Jeanne F. Franklin
Jeanne helps clients resolve specific disputes and address chronic conflict through mediation and facilitation. She provides training and consults to help groups build conflict competence. In her career and volunteer activity, she has earned recognition for leadership, consensus building and growing solutions to problems. She salutes her colleagues named in Legal Elite, and all who share a dedication to the work of conflict resolution.
Yama Shansab
Yama Shansab handles business, employment, estate, and trust cases. He also advises clients in business, employment, fiduciary and succession matters. He is AV-rated by Martindale Hubbell, a member of the VSB Professionalism Course Committee, and a Fellow of the Litigation Counsel of America. Yama authors the Virginia Fiduciary Law Blog.
Juridical Solutions PLC
Norris & St. Clair, P.C.
Bank of America Building 57 S. Main St., Suite 215 Harrisonburg, VA 22801 Tel: 1-888-392-8742 Fax: 1-888-343-3804 www.juridicalsolutions.com
2840 S. Lynnhaven Pkwy Virginia Beach, VA, 23452 Ph: 757-498-7700 Fx: 757-498-7744 Email: jnorris@norrisstclair.com Web: www.norrisstclair.com
John Norris
Hon. John J. McGrath, Jr. (Ret.)
John Norris specializes in construction law, commercial litigation and condemnation proceedings. A graduate of the Washington and Lee School of Law and the College of William and Mary, Mr. Norris has extensive experience in all types of construction disputes, having represented both owners and contractors in area State and Federal courts, as well as before mediators and arbitrators. Norris’ firm also handles personal injury and professional malpractice litigation.
Juridical Solutions PLC is proud to congratulate one of its founding members, the Honorable John J. McGrath, Jr. (Ret.) for his selection as one of Virginia’s Elite providers of Alternate Dispute Resolution services. Juridical Solutions PLC is unique in that it provides ADR Services throughout the Commonwealth by a Panel of Senior Professionals consisting exclusively of Retired Circuit Judges. Juridical Solutions PLC has panel members located throughout the Commonwealth, including the Shenandoah and New River Valleys, Lynchburg, Norfolk-Tidewater, Williamsburg-Richmond, Fredericksburg and Northern Virginia.
www.VirginiaBusiness.com
VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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2013 Virginia Legal Elite Rebecca Catharine Bowen ThompsonMcMullan PC Richmond
Lauren Morgan Ellerman Frith & Ellerman Law Firm Roanoke
Lisa Joan Hedrick Hirschler Fleischer Richmond
Michael K. Kim Stites & Harbison Alexandria
Amber K. Burke Odin, Feldman & Pittleman PC Reston
Ryan Gregory Ferguson Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
Jeffrey Alexander Hord Albo & Oblon, LLP Arlington
Michael E. Lacy Troutman Sanders LLP Richmond
Adam Casagrande Williams Mullen Richmond
Brent R. Gary Reed Smith LLP Falls Church
Lindsay M. Jefferies The Havrilak Law Firm PC Fairfax
Helenanne Connolly Reed Smith LLP Falls Church
Jeffrey Peter Geiger Hirschler Fleischer Richmond
Harold Edward Johnson Williams Mullen Richmond
Rodney S. Dillman Hancock, Daniel, Johnson & Nagle PC Virginia Beach
D. Rossen S. Greene Pender & Coward Suffolk
Ashley Catherine Dobbin Herbert & Satterwhite PC Richmond
Elizabeth Leigh Gunn Sands Anderson PC Richmond
Boleman Law Firm, P.C. Richmond Office 2104 W. Laburnum Ave., Ste 201 (804) 355-2057 Hampton Office 2 Eaton St., Ste 106 (757) 825-5577 Virginia Beach Office 272 Bendix Rd., Ste 130 (757) 313-3000
Mark Leffler
Mark is Chief Counsel of Boleman Law Firm, a recognized author and speaker on consumer bankruptcy, and the first debtor’s counsel appointed to the Board of Directors of National Association of Chapter 13 Trustees Academy. He is a member of the Board of Governors of the Va. State Bar’s Bankruptcy Section and has been named “Virginia’s Legal Elite” in bankruptcy since 2007.
Owen & Owens plc 15521 Midlothian Turnpike, Suite 300 Midlothian, Virginia 23113 Phone: (804) 594-1911 Fax: (804) 594-0455 E-mail: mowens@owenowens.com Web: www.owenowens.com
Mary Burkey Owens
Mary is a founding partner and focuses her practice on family law, collaborative law and mediation. Mary is a founding member of the Metro Richmond Family Law Bar and served on the VSB Disciplinary Committee and Professionalism Course Faculty. She has been named to Virginia Super Lawyers since 2006. Virginia Lawyers Media selected Mary for “Influential Women of Virginia” in 2011. She is listed in The Best Lawyers in America in Collaborative Law: Family Law.
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Lisa Hornberger Leiner Harman Claytor Corrigan & Wellman Richmond Lee Garland Lester Williams Mullen Richmond
Derek E. Karchner McCandlish & Lillard PC Fairfax James Mick “Jamie” Kessel Allen, Allen, Allen & Allen Richmond
Margaret M. Marks Odin, Feldman & Pittleman PC Reston Jennifer D. Mullen Roth Doner Jackson Gibbons Condlin PLC Richmond
Allen, Allen, Allen, & Allen
Offices in Richmond & Short Pump Phone: 804-353-1200 JJames.kessel@allenandallen.com www.allenandallen.com w
James Mick Kessel
Jamie Kessel has dedicated his career to fighting for the rights of Virginians who have been seriously injured or killed because of the negligence of others. He has obtained an “AV Preeminent” rating from Martindale Hubbell and has been selected a Rising Star by Virginia Super Lawyers since 2010.
Owen & Owens plc 15521 Midlothian Turnpike, Suite 300 Midlothian, Virginia 23113 Phone: (804) 594-1911 Fax: (804) 594-0455 E-mail: skaufman@owenowens.com Web: www.owenowens.com
Samuel J. Kaufman
Sam is a founding partner and represents businesses and individuals in general litigation, commercial litigation and real estate matters. He is immediate past-president of the University of Richmond Alumni Association and chairman of the Chesterfield County Economic Development Advisory Council. He has been honored as one of the “Top 40 Under 40” by Style Weekly Magazine and the National Trial Lawyers Association.
2013 Virginia Legal Elite Christy L. Murphy Kaufman & Canoles PC Norfolk
S. Mohsin Reza Troutman Sanders LLP Tysons Corner
John “Mac” McRae Stuckey III CarMax Auto Superstores Inc. Richmond
Jon Allon Nichols Jr. Harman Claytor Corrigan & Wellman Richmond
Lynne Cathryn Rhode Williams Mullen Richmond
Elizabeth Kalocay Ufkes Swartz, Taliaferro, Swartz & Goodove PC Norfolk
Ethan Geoffrey Ostroff Troutman Sanders LLP Virginia Beach
Rhodes Beahm Ritenour LeClairRyan Richmond
Travis Vance Wharton Aldhizer & Weaver PLC Harrisonburg
Gretchen M. Ostroff Vandeventer Black LLP Norfolk
Jodi Beth Simopoulos Hancock, Daniel, Johnson & Nagle PC Glen Allen
Kevin Andrew White Kaufman & Canoles PC Richmond
William Daniel Prince IV ThompsonMcMullan PC Richmond
W. Ryan Snow Crenshaw, Ware & Martin PLC Norfolk
Henry Irving Willett III Christian & Barton LLP Richmond
Laurie Lea Proctor Blankingship & Keith PC Fairfax
Nathaniel Lyle Story Hirschler Fleischer Richmond
J. Bradley Reaves ReavesColey PLLC Chesapeake
Thomas Strelka Strickland, Diviney, & Strelka Roanoke
DiMuroGinsberg, P.C.
Ventker & Warman, pllc
1101 King Street, Suite 610 Alexandria, VA 22314 Tel: (703) 684-4333 Fax: (703) 548-3181 E-mail: bdimuro@dimuro.com
101 West Main Street, Suite 810 Norfolk, VA 23510 phone: 757.625.1192 direct: 757.625.1476 cell: 757.560.5054 email: dventker@ventkerlaw.com web: www.ventkerlaw.com
Bernard J. DiMuro
David N. Ventker
Dave Ventker, a Proctor in Admiralty, has been handling commercial and maritime disputes for nearly 25 years. Practicing in Virginia and North Carolina, he has been rated AV and “Preeminent” by his peers for more than ten years, placing him among the top 5% of all attorneys.
Walton & Adams pc 1925 Isaac Newton Square #250 Reston, Virginia 20190 Phone: 703-790-8000 Fax: 703-790-8016 Email: mholleran@walton-adams.com Web: www.walton-adams.com
Michael J. Holleran Mike has assisted businesses and individuals for over 25 years. He has vast experience in the buying and selling of businesses, commercial leases, loan financing, commercial litigation, and creditor’s rights. He is active in community affairs and serves as a member and Past President of the McLean Rotary Club. He is also a co-author of West’s Bankruptcy Code Manual.
Ben is a well known litigator, having tried hundreds of cases involving complex corporate and commercial matters, business torts and employment disputes. He is widely recognized for his experience guiding clients through the unusually efficient Federal Court in Alexandria, known as “The Rocket Docket.” Ben is also qualified as an Expert Witness in various courts in the arena of Business and Professional Ethics and Professional Responsibility. Ben is a former Virginia State Bar President and an inductee to The Fellows of the American Bar and The Virginia Law Foundation.
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Business Trends: Commercial Insurance
Assessing the danger Many companies facing broader risks than before
Chris Burns says companies holding events need to know “exactly what it is that you are insuring and who will be coming.”
by Joan Tupponce
O
rganizers of the Dominion Riverrock concert in Richmond in May found they had more than crowds and weather to contend with after someone threw a bottle at reggae singer Frederick “Toots” Hibbert, injuring the 70-year-old performer. In June, Hibbert’s attorneys filed a lawsuit in Richmond Circuit Court asking for $1 million in compensatory damages and $20 million in punitive damages.
Photo by Mark Rhodes
This type of incident is just one of the risks that companies must consider when getting commercial liability insurance for an event. “The safest way to protect yourself is to know exactly what it is that you are insuring and who will be coming,” says Chris Burns, CEO of USI Insurance Services in Norfolk. “Typically people don’t think it through.” Companies hosting events need to think about issues ranging from security www.VirginiaBusiness.com
risks to vendors. “You need to know who the vendors are and if they are insured. A lot of problems we see come from uninsured vendors,” Burns says, adding that alcoholic beverages are served at many events. “The key focus from the client and agent standpoint is making sure we know who is taking the liquor liability piece.” R.C. Moore, chairman of TB&R insurance in Richmond, works with a VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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Commercial Insurance client that holds one of the largest events in Virginia. The organization’s main concern was security, a growing risk for large event organizers since the April bombing at the Boston Marathon. “They wanted to make sure they had adequate coverage,” Moore says, adding that the insurance industry doesn’t currently have a specific product for an occurrence such as the bombing in Boston. Insurance companies typically use traditional liability coverage in combination with federally backed terrorism coverage for events that draw large crowds. “The [terrorism] coverage is triggered by the secretary of state,” Moore says. “That allows the insurance companies to be reimbursed for acts of terrorism. That, however, was not used in Boston.” Coverage for events is just one of the topics trending in commercial insurance today. “The biggest overall trend is that the risks our clients are facing are much broader Schutt than they have been traditionally,” says Chris Schutt, managing
director and Richmond office head for Marsh Inc., an international insurance brokerage and risk management company. “Companies have to identify their risks and establish risk management programs.” One area of broader risk is cyber privacy liability, which poses a significant risk to all firms. The coverage protects a company’s reputation as well as any type of data breach. “Many of the standard insurance policies were not designed to address these types of risks,” Schutt says. “Businesses should identify what type of cyber or privacy risks they have.” This type of coverage is “one of the most important” coverages to have, says John Stanchina, president of Rutherfoord, a Marsh & McLennan Agency company with Stanchina offices in Roanoke, Richmond, Alexandria and Hampton Roads. Over the last 10 years the coverage has improved. “The pricing has come down,” Stanchina says. Other industry trends include cov-
erage related to the weather and the economy. The slow economic recovery is generating more activity around the trade credit market. Many companies have to write off account receivables because they are having trouble collecting customer payments. “The trade credit market can insure against that credit risk,” Schutt says. “Accounts receivable are a key cash-flow component that can be protected in a simple and cost-effective manner with a welldesigned trade credit program that helps protect against unexpected bad debts, helping to preserve cash flow and protect profitability.” Regarding weather, the insurance industry is seeing more government involvement in handling claims after an event such as Superstorm Sandy, which devastated the New York and New Jersey coastline in October 2012. “The government is getting involved more and dictating how claims will be handled,” says Burns. “In New York and New Jersey the government had some stringent standards as to how carriers were to handle claims. We hadn’t seen that before.”
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The damage from Sandy that occurred in Virginia is not being adjusted as quickly and efficiently as New York and New Jersey “because the government was dictating how some of the claims would be handled,” Burns says. “That is a huge challenge from the carrier perspective for the industry if government is going to dictate how deductibles will be administered.” Insuring coastal property is always a challenge. In the past, insurance carriers have looked at how far a business is from the bay or the ocean. Now they are adding distances from major and small tributaries as well as rivers and fingers of rivers. “It’s getting elongated as to what is coastal property,” Burns says. “They are doing a remapping of flood zones in a lot of areas.” Businesses involved in the marine industry also are dealing with the aftermath of the Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster in Italy. The Concordia was the largest marine loss of all time with claims exceeding $1 billion. Thirty-two people lost their lives in the disaster. Some lawsuits are still pending. “That had an effect across all the carriers and reinsurance in the marine world,” says Burns. ”You will probably see additional rate increases in January that could cause a stiffening in the marine marketplace.” Cargo is also becoming an issue for businesses that want to insure goods because of government sanctions on certain countries such as Iran. “The carrier won’t pay that claim based on sanctions,” Burns says. “You have to make sure you know where your containers are going.” Because of these growing risks, Stanchina believes that more and more businesses are moving from the traditional insurance marketplace to captives, a form of self-insurance. “This is less about year-to-year rate [changes] and more about control, flexibility and softening the curves,” Stanchina says. “In many cases a captive may not have the least expensive premium in a very soft market, but it will have the least expensive total cost of risk in most cases. It will eliminate the highs of a hard market. It takes some of the roller coaster effect out of the insurance marketplace.”
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Commercial Insurance
Markel expands its scope Alterra deal extends its presence in reinsurance and the global marketplace by Joan Tupponce
A
nthony Markel sees the recent acquisition of Bermuda-based Alterra Capital Holdings Ltd. as a good fit for Markel Corp. “Alterra’s book of reinsurance business and its technical talent were intriguing,” says Markel who is vice chairman of the Henrico County-based company founded by his grandfather. “They were in a space we didn’t occupy.” The $3.3 billion Alterra deal, completed in May, was the largest in the company’s history. “We paid a fair price for it. We didn’t steal it,” Markel says. “We did a thorough due diligence.” Mark Dwelle, director of insurance equity research at RBC Capital Markets in
Richmond, believes the deal broadens the scope of Markel Corp. “It gives them a more global platform and deepens their market share in U.S. markets where they had a presence in U.S. specialty insurance,” he says. “It’s fair to say they added a lot of good people and a number of new products. They extended their reach in the U.S. and London.” Markel Corp. began making acquisitions in 1980 when the company was valued at $7.5 million. Today’s value is more than $7 billion. The Alterra acquisition helps strengthen and diversify the company’s specialty insurance business, officials say. The deal has spawned
New leader at Scott Insurance Walker Sydnor retiring after leading company for 27 years
L
insurance agency/broker eadership is changing at one of in the Southeast and the Virginia major insurance brokerlargest in Virginia, North ages. Carolina and Tennessee. Walker Sydnor, the president of During the past 27 Lynchburg-based Scott Insurance, will reyears, the company has tire at the end of the year after leading the opened six offices in three company for 27 years. Sydnor states, expanding into He will be succeeded on Jan. 1 by larger commercial marHutch Mauck, who has headed the firm’s kets by developing new Richmond office since opening it in services and creating an 1991. The transition concludes a twoemployee stock ownership year succession process. plan (ESOP), which has Under Mauck’s direction, the Richled to a 97 percent emmond office has become the company’s Mauck ployee retention rate. highest-producing in Virginia. He has The number of company employees served on the Scott board since 2003 and on the executive committee since has grown from 30 to more than 240 since 1986. 2009. Sydnor has worked for the comFounded in 1864, Scott Insurance pany for 37 years. Under his tenure as provides risk services, benefit services, president, Scott Insurance, a regional bonds, and financial management. In Vircompany in 1986, grew to become the ginia, the company has offices in Lynchsecond-largest independently owned burg, Roanoke and Richmond.
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two new businesses: Markel Global Reinsurance and Markel Global Insurance, which handles large commercial accounts. With the exception of a few products such as marine coverage, Markel Corp. has “historically stayed with small to medium accounts,” Markel says. Alterra’s large accounts, which included Fortune 1000 companies, made it very attractive to Markel Corp. “We were comfortable with Alterra’s toehold and strength,” Markel says. “It had some real meat on the bones and talent.” Before the Alterra deal, Markel Corp. also only had a small book of reinsurance that it inherited in 2000 after acquiring Terra Nova Holdings Ltd. for more than $600 million. “That was a major deal for us at that time,” Markel says. After the acquisition, Terra Nova was rebranded as Markel International. The Terra Nova deal also gave Markel Corp. entry to the international marketplace. Terra Nova had branches in the United Kingdom and operated in other foreign countries. The Alterra acquisition expands Markel’s international presence, bringing into the fold three offices in South America and operations in the Far East in addition to its headquarters in Bermuda. With the new addition, Markel Corp. has approximately $23 billion in combined assets and $6 billion in shareholders’ equity. “Historically Markel usually takes every acquisition and makes it better over some period of time,” Dwelle says. “Sometimes they work quickly; sometimes it takes longer. The first few quarters are the slowest period for earnings and benefits of the deal.” Markel Corp. reported diluted earnings per share of $2.24 for the second quarter ended June, down from $8.42 in the same quarter last year. Those results, the first since the Alterra deal was finalized, reflected transactions costs and acquisition-related expenses. Operating revenues rose 48.8 percent to $1.03 billion. “My initial thought is that it’s a good acquisition. Things are going as planned. Time will tell, though,” says Robert Farnam, senior vice president at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods in New York. “It’s fairly early.”
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Business Trends: Airports
No flight of fancy Consolidating airline industry makes airports more competitive by Gary Robertson
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he recession, combined with airline mergers and consolidation, has jolted airports in Virginia and nationwide. A study released in May by the MIT International Center for Air Transportation found that the nation’s 29 largest airports lost 8.8 percent of their scheduled domestic flights from 2007 to 2012. Smaller airports were hit harder, losing 21.3 percent of their flights. One outcome is that Virginia’s airports have become more competitive. They’re improving the passenger experience and innovating at every opportunity. From small airports to large, change is underway, with projects costing a total of more than $50 million. Here’s a rundown on the runway:
Shenandoah Valley Regional At Shenandoah Valley Regional Airport in Weyers Cave, the smallest of the state’s nine commercial airports, a recent $2.2 million terminal expansion nearly doubled the preflight waiting area, and the lobby has been reoriented to face the scenic Blue Ridge Mountains. The airport’s improvements include a new café, Wi-Fi service and places to power-up technology. It also added 100 parking spaces, bringing its total to more than 600. The changes have had an effect. “We have increased [passenger traffic] every year since 2008,” says Greg Campbell, the airport’s executive director. “The year to date, we’re up 16 percent.” Campbell believes that prospective passengers have increasingly seen the value of using the airport. He ticks off some advantages: free parking, shorter lines, less driving and good connections. Through Silver Airways, operating as United Express, airport passengers fly to Washington Dulles International Airport, where they can connect to hundreds of domestic and international destinations. The airport lost Frontier Airlines, which flew nonstop flights to Orlando, Fla., three times a week. Photo courtesy Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project
A primary goal of a 23-mile extension of the Washington Metro Rail System is linking the capital by rail to Washington Dulles International Airport.
Washington Dulles International and Reagan National Washington Dulles International Airport, straddling the line between Loudoun and Fairfax counties, is a key hub for airports throughout Virginia, with connections to far flung parts of the world. Now, it’s awaiting a connection of its own — to the Silver Line, also called the Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project. A primary goal of the 23-mile extension of the Washington Metro Rail System is linking the capital by rail to Dulles, along with the so-called “edge cities” in the region. Another goal is to make Tysons Corner, one of the region’s biggest employment hubs, accessible by train. The Silver Line is one of the largest transportation projects in the country and is expected to cost nearly $6 billion when finished. Phase I of the project is nearly complete, and Phase 2 is under construction. The entire project is expected to be wrapped up and running by the end of the decade. www.VirginiaBusiness.com
The Silver Line is also expected to be an economic boon for Fairfax and Loudoun counties, with new development blossoming along its path. If food and shopping are on your mind when you fly out of Dulles or Reagan, the airports have good news for you. They recently began their most ambitious food and retail makeover in two decades. Over the next few years, nearly all of the airports’ concessions will be replaced or renovated. “One of our goals will be to bring local iconic brands into the airports,” says Rob Yingling, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which operates Dulles and Reagan National airports. Dulles has experienced a steady increase of international service every year since 2003. For example, the airport reported in early 2013 that Dulles had become the second largest gateway to the Middle East. Reagan continues to have strong demand for domestic service. It had its most traffic ever in 2012. VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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Airports Melinda Crawford says Charlottesville Albemarle Airport saw passenger traffic rise 34 percent from 2009 through 2012.
Roanoke Regional After spending millions of dollars on airfield improvements, Roanoke Regional Airport officials decided two years ago that its terminal, built in 1989, needed a facelift. “We had sort of made a promise to the community,” says executive director Jacqueline Shuck. “We want them to be proud of what we present. It’s our community’s front door, especially for business.” The airport accomplished the re-do in three stages. The first phase, which has cost about $4 million, focused on the concourse. New escalators have been installed, carpeting has been replaced by high-grade tile, six restrooms have been rebuilt, and signage has been modernized. Finally, colors have been changed from blue and gray to earth tones with a splash of red. “It’s changed the whole look,” Shuck says. The second phase of the overhaul will involve development of a new concession area, while the third phase will tackle the ticket and baggage claim areas. Shuck says an airport of Roanoke’s size can’t always compete with larger airports on ticket prices, but it can offer travelers convenience and the personal attention that they might not receive elsewhere. A new role the airport has taken on is advocate for passengers, Shuck says. If flights are continually late on a certain airline, “We try to get to the bottom of it,” she says. Allegiant Air’s service from Roanoke to two Florida destinations — St. Petersburg 88
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and Orlando — has become a magnet for regional passengers. “We see people coming from an hour and a half away,” Shuck says. Allegiant is one of four airlines that serve Roanoke. Lynchburg Regional Lynchburg Regional Airport is different. “We’re the only commercial airport in Virginia owned by a local government,” says Mark Courtney, the airport’s manager. It’s also very busy because of one of its neighbors, Liberty University. During the past decade, Liberty’s School of Aeronautics has grown from four students to more than four hundred in its FAA-certified aviation program. The university says it has been approved to train and certify everyone from private pilots to airline transport pilots. That means a lot of flying at the local airport. Commercially, the airport is served by U.S. Airways with connections to Charlotte, N.C. Lynchburg Regional recently received a $4.1 million grant from the Federal Aviation Administration for rehabilitation, relocation and expansion for its taxiways and aprons. It is part of a $5.8 million project that will also include reconstruction and realignment of several taxiways that serve general aviation. Earlier this year, Lynchburg was told that it might lose its control tower, unless it could prove that it fulfills a compelling
national interest. So far, the tower is still in operation. But Courtney says he doesn’t know what’s ahead. Charlottesville Albemarle Melinda Crawford, executive director of the Charlottesville Albemarle Airport, says one of the reasons she came to the airport in 2012 was the strong community support it enjoys. She had been director of the Pensacola International Airport in Florida, which was named Florida’s commercial airport of the year in 2011. “Any airport is the best economic engine any community could have,” she says. “It virtually operates without tax dollars, and it serves as the first impression of the community.” Since 2009, the Charlottesville Albemarle Airport has enjoyed a 34 percent increase in passenger traffic, soaring from 347,000 passengers in fiscal 2009 to more than 464,000 in 2012. Crawford says the airport is in the final stages of completing an 800-foot runway extension in the works for several years. The airport also is redesigning its terminal to include upgrades ranging from family restrooms and mothers’ nursing stations to a second security screening lane and an in-line screening machine to move passengers and their baggage through more quickly. Total cost of the project is estimated at $3 million to $4 million. “We’re making sure we have good amenities, and we’re making sure the public is aware of the amenities,” Crawford said. Norfolk International Norfolk International Airport is adjacent to the Norfolk Botanical Garden, and the airport plays on that theme, calling the main lobby of its departure terminal, “Garden Square.” Soon, the lobby will have a much more gardenlike setting, with a profusion of natural sunlight. Skylights are being installed in the ceiling as part of more than $20 million in airport improvements. Lobby improvements will include the replacement of four escalators that carry passengers from the first-level ticketing area to the second-level main lobby. New carpet and hard-surface terrazzo flooring also will be installed, as well as additional plantings and furniture, and areas for Photo by Mark Rhodes
Airports small children. Security checkpoints will be greatly expanded, from four to six lanes, to give passengers and security personnel more room. New and expanded restaurants, upgraded and healthier menu choices, and renovations to retail and gift shops also are in the new mix. “You’re going to have a different airport,” says Robert Bowen, the airport’s deputy executive director. General aviation facilities will get upgrades, including renovation of the terminal and expanded public parking. “It’s a very challenging time with the economy, but air travel is still a necessity,” Bowen says. “There’s no question some factors are beyond our control. But we’re in the black, and we’ve never been in the red. We’re a very low-cost facility.” Newport News/ Williamsburg International In 2012, the Newport News/Williamsburg International Airport lost AirTran Airways when it was acquired by Southwest Airlines. “It accounted for 43 percent of our market share. It was a big hit for us, and we’re still recuperating,” says Jessica Wharton, the airport’s director of marketing and public affairs. The airport now is served by four airlines: Allegiant, Delta Air Lines, Frontier Airlines and US Airways, with nonstop service to Atlanta, Charlotte, Denver, Orlando and Philadelphia. The airport lost nonstop service to New York and Boston. The airport anticipates a boost when Apple Vacations begins offering nonstop service to Cancun via Frontier Airlines. Flights will run from Feb. 8 through April 19. Meanwhile, the airport is forging ahead with a list of improvements. For example, an $11 million project to repave three taxiways is nearing completion, and one of its concourses is being refurbished with new skylights and flooring and a new escalator. The refurbishment is expected to cost about $4.2 million. Richmond International Richmond International Airport celebrated the arrival of Southwest Airlines in early November. “It’s something we’ve requested for more than 15 years,” says Troy Bell, the airport’s director of marketing and air service Rendering courtesy Norfolk International Airport
At Norfolk International Airport, the new main lobby features 10,000 square feet, skylights, terrazzo flooring, new furnishings and planters.
development. When Southwest serves an airport, Bell says, it sets the bar for pricing. “When Southwest is not in the market, prices tend to be higher.” Southwest offers daily nonstop service to Orlando, and its merger partner, AirTran, will continue nonstop service to Atlanta. Having secured Southwest, the airport now has trained its sights to the West. Using a $750,000 federal grant and $150,000 in local contributions, it plans to gain more access to Western markets. The money will offset revenue losses
for airlines that establish Western routes to preferred destinations. Currently, airport travelers have nonstop Western service to only Dallas, Houston and Minneapolis. Richmond International suffered a setback in 2010 when discount airline JetBlue ended its popular service to New York. Since then, Richmond-to-New York fares have soared. “There’s been a 700 percent increase in walkup fares [to New York] since then,” Bell says, reflecting how quickly things can change in the airline industry.
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An appetite for growth
Retail activity picks up in Virginia with a push from grocers and restaurants. Kroger opened a new megastore in Virginia Beach last summer and has another one under construction in Henrico County.
by M.J. McAteer
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irginians do not live by bread alone. They live on sub sandwiches, ribs, doughnuts and frozen yogurt. When they opt for slow food, they want a buffet of grocery shopping options. Restaurant and grocery options are expanding in Virginia as the retail development market continues to recover. While some major retailers, including Sears and JCPenney, are struggling, restaurant chains, fast-food outlets and major grocers are acting as anchors for small- and large-scale developments. As is the case across the nation, renovation is more prevalent than new construction, according to Jesse Tron of the International Council of Shopping Centers. That means vacant space left C
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over from leaner economic times is slowly being absorbed, so better times should lie ahead. “We’re seeing a big difference,” says Brett Womack McNamee of Divaris Real Estate Inc.’s Richmond office. “Developments that were in the pipeline are starting. It’s not crazy, but it’s almost back to normal.” In Richmond, Cushman & Wakefield|Thalhimer reports that the retail vacancy rate went from 7 percent in the second quarter to 6.8 percent in the third, with rental rates rising from $13.40 to $13.61. The biggest project under construction in the capital area: A Kroger mega store — expected to come in at more than 120,000 square feet — at Staples Mill Marketplace in Henrico County. I
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In Northern Virginia, Costar, a commercial real estate information company, reports that the retail vacancy rate dropped from 4.9 percent in the second quarter of 2013 to 4.6 percent in the third, with average rental rates rising slightly, from $23.55 to $23.78. The largest delivery of new retail space there: a 143,416-square-foot Costco in Southeast Fairfax. The story repeats throughout the state. Wegman’s, Martin’s, Whole Foods, Harris Teeter, Fresh Market and WalMart are either establishing a presence in Virginia submarkets or expanding the number of outlets. Restaurant and fastfood chains, including Zoe’s Kitchen, Panda Express, Chipotle, Potbelly, Noodles Express, Five Guys, Skinny Dip, E
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Commercial Real Estate >> sweetFrog, Café Rio and Chili’s also are proliferating. Another trend: many of Virginia’s major malls, including Potomac Mills in Woodbridge, recently have undergone major updates, so expect some new looks and tenants during the holiday shopping season. In brief, here’s a look at the major activity in Virginia’s retail submarkets. Central Virginia When the economy took a hit in 2009, retail in Central Virginia didn’t feel as much of an impact as other areas, says John Nielsen of Cushman & Wakefield|Thalhimer. “There was no bubble to pop. We were never oversaturated,” he says. The biggest new grocery store development in Charlottesville is — no surprise — a Wegman’s, which will anchor the 80-acre, Fifth Street Station shopping center near Interstate 64 just south of town. Groundbreaking is scheduled to begin late this year. Another new player in that market is California-based Trader Joe’s, an anchor at the Shops at Stonefield, a 230,569-square-foot, mixed-use development at U.S. 29 and Hydraulic Road. Trader Joe’s is open along with a boutique hotel and other retailers. In Lynchburg, another grocer, Fresh Market, opened a store this fall. It will anchor a shopping complex projected to include Petco, Panera Bread, Mattress Warehouse and Smoothie King. Nielsen says the arrival of Fresh Market shows that additional growth is sustainable in the Ward Road corridor, which already is home to a Wal-Mart Supercenter and a Kroger’s. Besides the Kroger’s at Staples Mill Marketplace in Henrico County, McNamee says, Martin’s will open a 74,000-square-foot grocery store at Midlothian Turnpike and Charter Colony Parkway in 2014. Next year, Golfsmith, a Texas company, plans to enter the Richmond market with a 24,000-square-foot store at West Broad Village, while a Dick’s Sporting Goods opened last summer at Southpark Mall in Colonial Heights. Village Center in South Richmond is poised to make an announcement on a major new anchor, McNamee says, and construction has begun on Libbie Mill, C
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a mixed-use development in Henrico County that will include 160,000 square feet of office and retail space. Its first tenant is a new player in the market, gourmet food store Southern Season. It will open in mid-2014. Lots of casual restaurants either are coming to town or expanding, McNamee says. They include American Tap Room (already at Willow Lawn), Firehouse Subs (already has three in Richmond), Moe’s Southwest Grill (all over the place), Which Wich (at Willow Lawn), Chuy’s (at West Broad Village), Saladworks (Short Pump)
Forest City Washington also hopes to go the mixed-use route pending county approval for upgrading its 580,000-square-foot Ballston Commons Mall in Arlington. The redevelopment would add street-facing retail and residential towers. A 250,000-square-foot retail space called Tysons West opened at Tysons this year and is anchored by an 80,000-squarefoot Wal-Mart, which includes grocery. Next year, in addition to the Costco coming into the area, a new Wegman’s will be the centerpiece of a 350,000-square-foot An 80,000-square-foot Walmart anchors a new retail area at Tysons.
and Travinia Italian Kitchen (not due until early 2014). “Lenders are lending again, so franchises can get loans,” says Connie Nielsen of Cushman & Wakefield|Thalhimer. “Richmond is strong as a second-tier market.”
retail and office development on Richmond Highway near Fort Belvoir. Shenandoah Valley After several quiet years, the market in the Interstate 81 corridor has improved, says Tim Reamer, a broker with Cottonwood Commercial in Harrisonburg. Just like in other parts of the commonwealth, food is the main retail driver, with fast casual and quick service outlets such as Texas Road House and Firehouse Subs debuting in the region. In Harrisonburg, construction of the Southeast Connector, a 5-lane, 6-mile stretch of highway, has inspired a 105acre, mixed-use development called Stone Port. Reamer says Stone Port likely will
Northern Virginia This region is home to the most prominent example of the trend toward mixed-use development, the reimaging of the near-derelict Springfield Mall as a Reston-style town center. The first phase of Vornado Realty Trust’s $200 million redo, which includes a health club, movie theaters and a food court, is scheduled to open next year. I
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<< Commercial Real Estate be anchored by a yet-to-be-announced supermarket and will feature restaurants, hotels and “Main Street”-style shops. He expects the project to break ground in 2014. In Waynesboro, Reamer says, modest new development will mostly be in the form of strip malls of 12,000 to 18,000 square feet that will be home to national brands such as Dunkin’ Donuts and Verizon. Southwest Virginia In Roanoke, Richmond-based WVS Co. has broken ground on The Bridges, a mixed-use development that eventually will encompass 1 million square feet of retail, entertainment, office and residential on the city’s riverfront. The big news in this part of the state: two developments five miles apart in the Tri-City area. In Bristol, Tenn., work is underway on The Pinnacle, a one-million-square-foot-plus shopping, dining and entertainment complex from Johnson Commercial Development.
Steve Johnson says his project eventually will encompass 500 acres straddling the Tennessee-Virginia line. Phase 1 focuses on the 250 acres on the Tennessee side of the state line, and it will be anchored by Bass Pro Shops (opening in mid-2014) and Belk’s department store (spring 2015). Johnson believes The Pinnacle will draw shoppers from “halfway to Nashville. It will be a “smorgasbord of retail like they’ve never seen before,” he says. Meanwhile The Falls, at Exit 5 off I-81 in Bristol, Va., is on a similar track for development. Mike Nidiffer of Interstate Development says that a Cabela’s sporting goods store should open there next year. Other announced tenants for the planned one-million-square-foot shopping center include casual restaurants Smoky Mountain Brewery, Zaxby’s and Calhoun’s.
fast casual restaurants also are driving development in Hampton Roads. Kroger’s opened one of its large Marketplace stores in Virginia Beach last summer and plans additional outlets for the booming Harbor View area of Suffolk and Portsmouth (2014). Wal-Mart is going into Virginia Beach and Williamsburg. Harris Teeter opened a store in Portsmouth in 2012 and in 2014 hopes to open two more stores, one at Ward’s Corner in Norfolk and the other at Sandbridge Commons in Virginia Beach. Gerald S. Divaris, chairman and CEO of Divaris Real Estate Inc. which is headquartered in Virginia Beach, adds that a Fresh Market is going into downtown Norfolk in 2014, and that Whole Foods, after opening a store in Virginia Beach in 2012, plans another store with a 2015 opening in Newport News. “Suburban development is driven by grocers,” Divaris declares. For a retail market that recently went through some lean times, that reality is a welcome bit of nourishment.
Hampton Roads Rob Wright of the commercial real estate company Katsias says grocers and
Sweet success Frozen yogurt shops take off with more expansion planned in 2014 by M.J. McAteer
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he proper name for a group of frogs is “an army,” and army is an apt way to describe the swelling ranks of one of Virginia’s biggest retail success stories in recent years, sweetFrog. The frozen yogurt chain started as a single location in the Short Pump area of Richmond in 2009. Derek Cha and his wife, Annah Kim, believed that they could fill a vacant niche in the market, and they were right. In less than five years, sweetFrogs have appeared in 28 states, Great Britain and the Dominican Republic. The company now has 300 corporate, licensed and franchised stores (franchise fee: $30,000) with 82 in the Old Dominion alone. Raven Williams, franchise sales director for the chain, recently said that the shops have average annual revenues of $500,000 to $1.5 million. James Denison, who does public C
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gummy frogs. But just as important to the The frozen yogurt chain’s success, says Denison, is its chain now has 300 stores. family values. “Frog” is an acronym for “fully rely on God.” The sweetFrog chain puts that sentiment into action by participating in food drives and sponsoring charitable events. Mascots Scoop and Cookie visit children’s hospitals and make appearances at local fundraisers. “We want to be there for our community,” Denison says. That community continues to relations for sweetFrog, credits the yogurt expand. The company now is marching chain’s phenomenal growth to two factors. into New England and the Great Lakes First, he says, it offers a quality prod- region and reportedly is eyeing South uct. Customers at the self-serve, sold-by- America for its next overseas theater of weight shops can pick from 20 flavors of operations. Kermit may have been right when he frozen yogurt, ranging from tried-and-true chocolate to quirky maple bacon donut. said that it wasn’t easy being green, but, for The store’s 50 toppings include mango frozen yogurt entrepreneur Derek Cha, it poppers, cheesecake bites and, of course, can be lucrative. I
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Business Trends: Technology
A safer drive? Virginia Tech institute tests automated vehicle technologies by Richard Foster The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute conducts research on its Virginia Smart Road, which includes a 175-foot-high Smart Road Bridge, the tallest statemaintained bridge in the state.
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ometime in the 2040s, your son or daughter is running late for a meeting across town. They pull up an app on their implanted smart device and find the nearest available driverless vehicle. The pod-like conveyance pulls up and waits for its passenger, like a theme park ride. The automated taxi drops the rider off at the appointed destination and then whisks away to retrieve its next client. Except for the body cyber implant (which, really, is as good as anyone’s guess at this point) that may be a fairly accurate vision of the future of transportation, which is being pioneered at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI). The institute, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in November, is road-testing and researching a variety of new vehicular technologies that are years — and in some cases decades — ahead of what one can find in today’s auto showrooms. “Long term, things are moving towards automation … but it’s an evolutionary process,” says Thomas A. Dingus, the institute’s executive director. “There are production vehicles out this year and last year that automatically brake. There are production cars out this year and over the next year that will actually do lane centering. That’s sort of the first step toward automated steering. … We’ve tested a lot of that technology here at VTTI over the last decade. It’s all moving toward full automation, although that’s quite a ways away. … Realistically you’re talking about 25 or 30 years, but it will go fast if the last 25 years is any indication.” This year, Dingus was honored at the White House as one of the Obama administration’s 2013 Champions of Change for his work on 21st-century transportation solutions. Since becoming VTTI director in 1996, Dingus developed it from a 15-employee center into the nation’s second-largest university transportation research institute, now employing a staff of more than 350. Its annual budget grew from $2 million to about $40 million
Photo by Logan Wallace, courtesy Virginia Tech
in just a decade as Dingus built partnerships with the federal government and the automotive industry. (About 25 percent of VTTI’s annual research budget comes from private industry; the balance is from state and federal funding.) The institute conducts more than 200 research projects a year, including testing new technologies for automotive manufacturers as an independent research facility. VTTI operates the Virginia Smart Road, a closed, test-bed facility in Blacksburg that includes a 2.2-mile test track and the 175-foot-high Smart Road Bridge, the tallest state-maintained bridge in the state. Researchers have logged more than 16,500 hours at the facility. This year, among many other projects, Tech researchers have road-tested the driverless Google Car at the Smart Road as part of a project in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Transportation, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Google and General Motors. The project tests how drivers react to www.VirginiaBusiness.com
warnings to take control of semiautonomous vehicles. There are different levels of automation in vehicles, explains Myra Blanco, who leads VTTI’s Automated Vehicle Systems research group, including features such as automated braking, lane changing and lane centering. Another technology has the car knowing its position relative to the car in front of it. In the Google study, Blanco says, “We’re basically looking at the human system interaction, looking at how the driver will hand off or cede control to the vehicle, then if something happens, how they would regain control of the vehicle again.” For instance, if the car encounters an unexpected road condition such as road construction, it could signal the driver to take over. VTTI is studying how to make that transition seamless and safe. The goal that transportation researchers are working toward is a fully automated car into which the user can input a destination and let the car safely do the VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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Technology rest. No company has gotten to that point yet, Blanco says, but the Google Car and projects such as CityMobil, a European pilot project testing automated mass transit, are steps toward the future. Conceivably, automating vehicles could virtually eliminate car crashes, alleviate traffic congestion and reduce gasoline usage, Dingus says, but first there will have to be redundant, reliable systems that are beyond foolproof. “We still have 32,000 or 33,000 fatalities a year. People say once vehicles are automated, that number will drop substantially,” Dingus says, “but if you’re in an automated vehicle and it crashes, it’s going to be on the front page of every newspaper in the country.” Toward that end, a major component of VTTI’s automated research is the ability to create a wireless network of smart vehicles sharing the road and trading data with one another. VTTI is conducting connected vehicle tests on the Smart Road and in real-world driving conditions on its Virginia Connected Test Bed, a stretch of highway with 43 wireless networking devices located at intersections along the Interstate 66 corridor in Fairfax County near state Routes 29 and 50. Using wireless technology, connected
VTTI has conducted testing on Google’s automated car on the Virginia Smart Road.
vehicles can build a virtual map of which cars are around them and where those cars are heading. Cars could relay information to each other such as warnings of slick roads so your vehicle will know to slow down, says Zachary Doerzaph, director of VTTI’s Center for Advanced Automotive Research. Connected vehicles also could collect information from road crews about construction hazards. One of the studies VTTI is conducting examines how stop signs could become “virtual yield signs,” Doerzaph says, allowing you to drive through the intersection without stopping if the car knows no other
VTTI also studies the effect technology has on driving habits, such as talking on a cell phone and texting.
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vehicles are nearby. Another potential use would allow state transportation departments to improve traffic flow by directing traffic to different lanes depending on the vehicle’s destination. VTTI is also looking at customizable software inside the car. Right now that means entertainment apps such as Pandora or Netflix, Doerzaph says, but one day the user could purchase additional software increasing the smart technology capabilities of the vehicle. There are questions to be answered, including whether the network would compete with cellphone bandwidth or operate solely on short-range technology. Also, due to infrastructure costs, it’s more likely that fixed wireless broadcast nodes would be located at strategic locations instead of being ubiquitous on roadways, Doerzaph says. And for safety’s sake, systems must be more reliable than a cell phone connection. Other challenges to using automated vehicles include regulatory questions and phasing out the existing fleet of nonautomated vehicles. Cars with the newest automation and smart features likely will be more expensive, Dingus says, so it could take 25 to 30 years before everyone is driving a connected or smart car. VTTI also is looking into whether older cars could become retrofitted with adaptive technology, Doerzaph says, but those cars probably wouldn’t have as high a level of functionality as cars with built-in technology. Other related research at VTTI examines “naturalistic driving” — monitoring drivers’ habits in the vehicle with technology including cameras and monitors. VTTI looks at factors such as texting (very bad), cell phone usage (surprisingly not so bad because the driver’s eyes are forward on the road when talking) and fatigue (a huge factor in crashes and near-crashes). Eventually VTTI research may be used to create more advanced, built-in monitoring applications for novice teen drivers that could send detailed report cards to parents about the teens’ driving habits, similar to current commercial products such as DriveCam and IntelliDrive. “We want to make sure we get this right the first time,” Doerzaph says. “The worst possible outcome is for us to do all this work and when it gets deployed, it decreases safety instead of increasing safety.” Photos courtesy Virginia Tech
Community Profile: Roanoke/New River Valley
Regional revival Manufacturing, tech sectors helping to rebuild area’s economy by Mason Adams
A
s the national economy continues to rebuild from the Great Recession, the Roanoke and New River valleys have seen a manufacturing resurgence. Once thought a casualty of globalism, industries that make stuff have made a comeback in the region. Whether it’s the Luxembourg-based food packaging company Ardagh Group announcing it would invest in a site in Roanoke County, or Virginia Tech-grown TECHLAB expanding biotech production to the Radford Industrial Park, manufacturing is helping to drive Virginia’s economic recovery. Health care remains the region’s biggest employment sector, with Carilion Clinic as the Roanoke region’s largest employer. But “manufacturing led us out of the recession,” says Beth Doughty, executive director at the Roanoke Regional Partnership. While job growth in the Roanoke and Blacksburg areas — home to a combined population of nearly half a million people — lags the national average, the region’s manufacturing sector has outpaced both the commonwealth and the nation. There’s potential for more, too. The 4-year-old Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and Research Institute reached its first full student capacity this fall. Economic development boosters hope the research institute will do for Roanoke what Virginia Tech’s Corporate Research Center (CRC) has done for Blacksburg: Provide a supportive environment for small companies to grow and hopefully remain in the region. An ‘exploding’ tech sector The 230-acre CRC has 155 tenants and is at nearly 99 percent of its capacity, according to its president, Joe Meredith. The center is adding two new buildings — one for a $5.5 million expansion by Rackspace’s IT hosting operation and the other for a $3.5 million propulsion laboratory operated by Virginia Tech’s engineering department — as well as athletic fields and amenities. Two tenants have expanded beyond the CRC. One of them, TECHLAB, a biotech Photo courtesy Virginia Tech
firm that started at Virginia Tech before locating in the CRC, bought a 54,000-squarefoot building in nearby Radford to house its manufacturing facilities. Also, Aeroprobe Corp., which makes instruments and software used in cars, jets, wind turbines and other applications, will invest $3 million over five years into a new site in Christiansburg’s Falling Branch Cor-
$240 million to upgrade its facility at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant. A Polish company, Korona Candles, will spend $18.3 million to establish a facility in Pulaski County, creating about 170 jobs. James Hardie Building Products expanded its Pulaski facility to nearly 1 million square feet. In the largest single manufacturing in-
Ignacio Saez is an assistant professor at Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. Economic development boosters hope the institute will help boost the growth of small businesses.
porate Park. Derick Maggard, executive director of the Roanoke-Blacksburg Technology Council, says Virginia’s tech sector “is exploding right now.” “This focus on entrepreneurship and innovation is only going to lead to greater growth,” Maggard says. “It’s not a bubble at all but the wave of the future.” Manufacturing moves Traditional manufacturing plants have expanded as well. Celanese Acetate, which employs more than 1,000 people at its Giles County facility, launched a $150 million capital project to convert its power plant from coal to natural gas. BAE Systems announced it will invest www.VirginiaBusiness.com
vestment in Roanoke County history, the Ardagh Group announced it would spend $93.5 million to renovate the former Hanover Direct building into a facility that can produce nearly 4.5 million food cans per day. Not all manufacturing news has been good, though: The Grede Holdings LLC said it would close the historic Radford Foundry, which had passed through the hands of several owners and employed 250 people when the closure was announced. “There are always ups and downs,” says Aric Bopp, executive director of the New River Valley Economic Development Alliance. “It’s sad to see companies that do face struggles and challenges. But for the most part, the economy in the region is VIRGINIA BUSINESS
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Community Profile: Roanoke/New River Valley The Roanoke Regional Airport invested in a makeover for its terminal, and Gov. Bob McDonnell announced in August that Amtrak would extend passenger rail service to Roanoke by 2016. Roanoke Valley governments also teamed up with the private sector to create a regional broadband authority to help encourage the expansion of affordable highspeed Internet service. In September, gigabit Internet service arrived in Blacksburg after a successful Crowdtilt crowd-sourcing campaign by TechPad, a co-working space near Virginia Tech. (See page 15.)
really firing up.” The companies that have manufacturing facilities in the region sell to a global market, and, if the economy continues to improve, Bopp and Doughty expect to see continued investment and job growth. No silver bullets Manufacturing isn’t the region’s only strong point, however. Everyone wants a “silver bullet” for economic development, Doughty says. “Everyone wants the one thing that will change things and make it better. That’s an antiquated view of the economy. It’s more like spinning plates: You have to have a lot going on to grow your economy in different ways.” In 2012, Moody’s Analytics ranked the Roanoke region 46th out of 384 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) for industrial diversity. It fell slightly this year, from 73 percent as diverse as the nation to 71 percent, but it still ranks high. In Virginia it ranks just below Richmond (72 percent) but is well ahead of the two localities tied for third in Virginia (Lynchburg and Winchester, at 58 percent each). “We’re not putting all of our jelly beans
Beth Doughty says searching for a single “silver bullet” is an “antiquated view of the economy.”
in one bucket,” says Wayne Strickland, executive director of Roanoke Valley-Alleghany Regional Commission. The localities that comprise the Roanoke Valley worked together in 2013 to collectively raise their lodging tax rates — a move that required General Assembly approval for Roanoke County — and provide a larger marketing budget for the Roanoke Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau to attract tourists.
Breweries bubble up Then there’s the region’s growing food economy. The biggest news in that sector was the announcement that Mexico-based Red Sun Farms would invest $30 million to build greenhouses on 45 acres in Pulaski’s NRV Commerce Park, creating 205 jobs within five years. Beneath the banner of that high-profile economic development victory, the local food movement has grown by leaps and bounds over the past decade. That includes the rapid expansion of
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Photo courtesy Roanoke Regional Partnership
Community Profile: Roanoke/New River Valley the regionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s craft brewing sector. While larger, traditional domestic beer companies have seen sales of products stagnate, craft beer labels have exploded in variety and revenue. Until 2013, however, Roanokeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s only brewer of note was Roanoke Railhouse, founded in 2009. The 2012 expansion by Nelson County-based Devilâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Backbone Brewing to a new facility just north of Roanoke in Lexington, however, may have inspired more regional brewers to step up. Devilâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Backbone expanded the Lexington plant at the end of 2012 and again this year, increasing its production capacity to 40,000 barrels per year. In the Roanoke and Blacksburg region, entrepreneurs launched Parkway Brewing Company in Salem, Sunken City Brewery in Franklin County near Smith Mountain Lake and Flying Mouse Brewery in Botetourt County. The largest of the three, Parkway Brewing, is producing 3,600 barrels per year, with plans to expand to 6,000. Owner Mike â&#x20AC;&#x153;Kenoâ&#x20AC;? Snyder says the brewery saw about 15 percent growth its first year. Sunken City invested $2.3 million at Westlake, where it produces canned prod-
uct. The brewery is on track to produce about 3,000 barrels this year and has the capacity to produce up to about 20,000 barrels per year. Owner Jerome Parnell says he hopes to expand distribution eventually into five to seven states. Local food loyalty Besides beer, thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been a surge of farming and food production in western Virginia, too. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Local products have really improved not just in quantity but in quality too,â&#x20AC;? says John Bryant, spokesman for the Roanoke Natural Foods Cooperative. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been a real step up in the game.â&#x20AC;? In 2003, Tenley Weaverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Good Food â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Good People, a Floyd County-based food aggregator, received local produce from five suppliers and maintained about eight accounts. Now, Good Food â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Good People channels local products from 40 farmers and nearly 30 other suppliers to numerous restaurants, farmers markets, wholesalers, a retail outlet and roughly 385 people who paid at the beginning of the season for regular deliveries through a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The percentile growth that our com-
pany and food system here is experiencing is off the charts,â&#x20AC;? Weaver says. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Will it hold? Of course not. It has to level at some point.â&#x20AC;? This year has been difficult for farmers, with unseasonably cool temperatures, record-breaking amounts of rain and generally unpredictable weather. The markets and demand for locally produced food, however, are better than theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been in decades. Farm-to-table restaurants, such as Local Roots, River to Rail and Bent Mountain Bistro, trumpet their commitment to local foods, while others, such as Alexanderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, regularly purchase regional goods as well. Nearly a dozen new farmers markets have cropped up. The success of one of them, the Grandin Village Community Market, founded in 2009, inspired the nearby Roanoke Natural Foods Cooperative to grow as well, expanding with not only a second, downtown location but also the establishment of an urban farm. Downtown boom The co-opâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s new satellite location in the freshly renovated Center in the Square building wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have been possible with-
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Community Profile: Roanoke/New River Valley out a residential development boom in downtown Roanoke. Richmond developer Bill Chapman, who previously launched the Lofts at West Station in a redeveloped warehouse, this year opened Parkway 301, which includes 89 apartment units in the former Shenandoah Building. Another developer, Faisal Khan, plans 90 units for the Crystal Tower Building, which he has renamed the Ponce de Leon in honor of its former life as a hotel. The rapid conversion of old warehouses and office buildings into apartments has resulted in new opportunities for retail stores.
One retail area, 16 West Marketplace, was developed as a commercial marketplace aimed at the new downtown population: It includes a grocery, pizzeria, coffee shop and more. The private sector investment has been boosted by the city government, too, which over the last decade has invested roughly $20 million into the Market Street corridor from the railroad to Elm Avenue. In October, the city reopened Elmwood Park after a $7 million renovation that included construction of a new amphitheater. “We try with public dollars to leverage what’s happening downtown to get more
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private investment,” says Roanoke City Manager Chris Morrill. That’s what happened with the sixstory Market Garage, which was renovated in 2009 at a cost of $6 million. That led to an announcement in 2012 by the Greenville, S.C.-based Windsor/Aughtry Co. that it would build a Hampton Inn on top of the structure. Bids came in several million dollars higher than the company expected, so it is working with city government to find ways to cut costs. The company still hopes to begin construction before year’s end. While the region’s retail sector still struggles with online competitors, clothier Larry Davidson said the work downtown has boosted his business: “I just sense the activity level is so totally different now. For me, personally, it’s very exciting to see the quality of the things it’s instilled up and down Market Street.” The city hopes to spin that activity into adjacent neighborhoods. Last year, the Roanoke City Council extended the downtown district south past the Roanoke River to an area that includes the Bridges, a planned $150 million development that broke ground in May. The first phase includes construction of an apartment building and the renovation of an existing structure into a coffeehouse and restaurant. City officials also designated a district just west of downtown for targeted federal redevelopment funds. Freedom First Credit Union will open a branch in the neighborhood, and the city council voted to sell the former health department building to Ed Walker, a renowned developer who previously redeveloped the Patrick Henry, the Cotton Mill Lofts and the former Hancock Building into apartments. One of the city’s traditional cornerstone companies, Advance Auto Parts Inc., announced in October it would acquire General Auto Parts International Inc., for $2 billion, meaning the largest automotive aftermarket parts provider in North America will be headquartered in Roanoke. Additionally, Virginia Western Community College offers courses in mechatronics — a combination of mechanical and electronic systems — that will prepare more workers for the kind of manufacturing companies that are making a home in the region. “Advanced manufacturing is our sweet spot,” says Doughty. “We’re just starting to see the beginning of a trend. It’s going to continue to go up.”
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Business Trends: Health Care
Navigating the pitfalls Website improves, but wave of cancellations upsets policyholders by Robert Burke
T
he October launch of the Affordable Care Act’s individual health insurance option was a mess, but it’s gotten better, say those who are helping people around Virginia apply for coverage. Improvements to the healthcare. gov website, which were due to be completed by Nov. 30, also let people find out how the new insurance options will affect them. For some it’s a lot better, for others, it isn’t. Robin Davis, an application counselor at New Horizons Healthcare in Roanoke, has been helping people trying to use the website for the past two months. She says applicants didn’t give up despite its early problems and that the flow of applicants remained steady. “They’re very understanding that there are going to be issues with something of this magnitude,” she says. “Most folks we talk to are willing to come back again and again.” They needed to do so because the site didn’t work at all when it was launched on Oct. 1. “It was horrible. It took us almost three hours to get through our first application,” Davis says. By early November, the same task took her 40 minutes, she says. “So it’s getting better.” Davis, who sees about five people a day, says most are older, lower income and currently without any health insurance. They’re generally pleased with the monthly premiums, and most qualify for tax credits available to low-income applicants, she says. But because Virginia hasn’t decided if it will take part in the proposed expansion of Medicaid, some applicants fall into a gap. They’re too poor to qualify for tax credits under the health-care law but have too much income to qualify for Medicaid. Jill Hanken is an attorney with the Virginia Poverty Law Center, which has about three dozen “navigators” around the state helping people use the insurance exchange. She says her group has been working around problems with the website by using paper applications or the 100
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Replacing the coverage is a complex decision for people to make, he says. His clients generally aren’t eligible for the tax credits to subsidize their premiums under insurance purchased on the exchange, he says. About 518,000 people in Virginia are eligible for the tax credits that would offset premium costs. The annual income threshold to be eligible is $94,200 for a family of four, and most of his clients make more than that, he says. Without the subsidies, the pricing for plans on and off the exchange can be significantly higher. “The bigger story to me is what products and pricing are available for next year for people who don’t qualify for subsidies,” he says. “People are very upset, generally speaking. Some are happy, but not many.” Clients who benefit are those who qualify for tax credits or have a preexisting health condition that was making insurance expensive. They’re getting less expensive plans on the exchange, he says. But most others are not getting tax credits, just higher premiums. “It’s a real struggle. If I tell somebody their premium went to $1,200 from $600, they don’t have that money,” he says. Admitting that his administration had “fumbled” rollout of the health-care law, President Obama announced in midNovember that insurers can extend for one year policies that had been cancelled because they failed to meet the law’s coverage requirements. At press time, it was unclear how the president’s move would affect cancelled policies in Virginia. Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the state’s largest health insurer, has been offering customers the option to renew early for one-year policies that otherwise would be discontinued on Jan. 1, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Hanken says all the uncertainty should spur consumers to get started now. “Things are getting better,” she says. “People will need to do the work to realize they have better choices.”
Application counselor Robin Davis works with a health-care applicant in Roanoke.
federal call center. Besides the website’s technical problems, many people are struggling to understand the “very different insurance landscape…people still have a lot to learn about it,” Hanken says. The Obama administration revealed in November that only 27,000 people, including 1,023 in Virginia, enrolled in health plans using the federal website during its first 33 days of operation. Another 79,000 enrolled on state-run exchanges. In response to problems with the exchange, the deadline for applying for insurance without incurring a penalty has been eased back from mid-February to March 31. In addition to the ACA’s website problems, many individual customers’ healthcare policies have been canceled because they didn’t offer coverage required by the law. The Wall Street Journal reported that more than 4 million people in 28 states had received cancellation notices by Nov. 14. No numbers were available on those affected in Virginia; insurers aren’t required to report how many policies are being canceled. For those facing a cancellation, it’s a big deal, says Herndon-based insurance agent Jonathan Katz. “It’s very widespread” among people who buy individual policies, he says. About 20 percent of his firm’s 2,500 clients are at risk. They started calling in early November with worried questions. “I set a personal record, I got 74 calls in one day,” he says.
Photo by Steven Mantilla
PreView of next month’s
General Assembly preview Gov.-elect Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, has pledged to seek bipartisan solutions, but can he and Republican legislators work together after a bitter campaign? Virginia Business takes a look at emerging issues for the 2014 General Assembly. The January issue also will examine: • Virginia’s top hospitals and a new source of state health-care information. • The potential effect a movie has on tourism in a Southwest Virginia town. • The increasing number of international students at Virginia business schools. • New developments in the Lynchburg region economy. • Predictions on commercial real estate growth in Virginia in 2014.
AP Photo by Alex Brandon
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