office backed by broad connections
Photo courtesy of Anne Marie Tavella.
Photo courtesy of Anne Marie Tavella.
he’s lots of fun at parties, Anne Marie Tavella says, laughing, before sharing her best dinner party conversation killer: a story about a construction contract dispute she litigated involving air entrainment in concrete.
Tavella is the lead construction attorney in the Anchorage office of Davis Wright Tremaine, LLP. Her practice primarily focuses on construction litigation, general commercial litigation, and government contracts law and counseling.
“With every phone call I get to learn about something that is really interesting,” she says. One call is about a client working on a US contract to build a flight simulator using an actual airplane in Jordan. The next call might be about work restoring an historic building on a military base and how to deal with the government and the local historical society.
“The facts are different, but the law involved is similar,” Tavella says.
Like the first government contract case she won, which helped a nonprofit with a contract to clean commissary buildings on military bases collect $60,000 shorted from a federal contract payment. The contracting officer alleged that a portion of the floors had not been waxed as required by the contract. Tavella says the government lacked proof and her client won the case.
“That’s a lot of money, especially for a nonprofit,” she says.
Tavella has significant experience litigating a wide variety of cases, including construction disputes, wrongful termination cases, products liability, and contract-based disputes. While litigation is sometimes unavoidable, she says she prefers to work with companies up front to avoid courtroom resolutions.
Before COVID changed many in-person aspects of daily life, Davis Wright Tremaine offered information to AGC members in Alaska on federal contracting and other topics. Tavella says she is working to resume legal seminars, similar to the popular and long-running Legal Bites and Bagels learning series.
“AGC is one of the key ways we work with contractors,” she says.
Longtime Alaska attorney Traeger Machetanz started the effort several years ago to share information with the Anchorage business community.
“It’s been a really long relationship,” Tavella says of Davis Wright Tremaine’s participation in AGC of Alaska through Machetanz.
Tavella and other Davis Wright Tremaine attorneys have been involved with AGC for many years. Prior to COVID, Davis Wright Tremaine attorneys also regularly attended AGC’s Federal Contractors Conference in Washington, D.C., and several plan to return to the event in June.
Photo courtesy of Caitlin Forbes.
After two summers as an intern, she was hired and returned to the firm after graduation, working in that firm’s Seattle office for six years before moving back to Alaska in 2014. Tavella joined the team at Davis Wright Tremaine in 2015.
Tavella is one of ten attorneys in the Anchorage office, each with varied skill sets: employment, environmental, corporate, real estate, construction and contract law.
This allows the firm to provide clients with a variety of legal services, from assisting with disputes with employees to purchasing real estate to audits with the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs.
That variety of services expands greatly outside of Alaska. Davis Wright Tremaine, LLP has 534 attorneys in offices in Los Angeles; New York; Portland; San Francisco; Seattle; Washington, D.C.; Bellevue, Washington; and Anchorage, where it has had an office since the ‘80s.
Working with a law firm with hundreds of attorneys on staff is a great resource for clients, Tavella says. If she doesn’t know an answer, there is almost always someone on staff she can ask.
“‘I have something going on with the FCC [Federal Communications Commission].’ ‘Oh, I think we have someone in the D.C. office who can help you with that,’” she says, describing a client’s question.
A partnership between C.K. Poe and A. J. Falknor launched the firm in 1909 and it’s grown to be the 91st largest in the United States, with 534 attorneys, according to the National Law Journal’s 2021 NLJ 500.
Partners and names changed many times before 1944 when John Davis founded what is the current iteration of Davis Wright Tremaine, LLP in Seattle, where its headquarters remain.
Based on gross 2020 revenue of $445 million , the firm was 89th on The American Lawyer’s 2021 Am Law 200 ranking, which ranks the top 200 law firms in America. And Davis Wright Tremaine was listed as the 116th highest-grossing law firm in the world, on the 2021 Global 200 survey.
Working with Clients
Construction was forecast to add $4.3 billion to the state’s economy, according to a January 2021 report prepared by McKinley Research Group for the Associated General Contractors of Alaska Industry Progress Fund.
Sizing up government spending is murkier. However, the federal government’s target is to spend $6.65 billion—about 5 percent—of its annual budget of more than $600 billion with Small Disadvantaged Businesses, such as 8(a) Program participants, according to the US Small Business Administration.
Tavella says Davis Wright Tremaine works with clients to navigate every step of the complex process from enrollment to bidding and executing government contracts. Sometimes that also means filing protests with the government agency bidding the work or representing clients in litigation.
“We work hand in hand with clients,” she says. “We’d much rather help a client avoid a problem than to come in on the back end. It helps us have a better chance of success.”
Rules in the contracting arena are always changing, she says. She flags those changes to clients who might be affected, and sometimes they need more substantive help to be compliant.
For example, she says she helped clients navigate the COVID vaccine mandate when it was in place for federal contractors.
Davis Wright Tremaine’s website, dwt.com, also hosts a blog called “Government Contractor Insider” that parses changes in rules for federal contracting.