Scandia-Germania-Davis, PLLC is an American boutique law firm founded in November of 2003 in the State of Minnesota.

The firm’s founder, T. Michael Davis, is actively licensed to practice law as an attorney in New York and Minnesota, both state and federal courts. He is also admitted to practice in New Jersey.

Davis earned his Bachelor of Arts degree with a double major in Scandinavian Languages and German (summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa) from the University of Minnesota. He later received his Masters of Public Administration degree in 1994 from the nation’s perennially number-one ranked Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. At the same time, Davis earned his Juris Doctor degree with a Certificate in International Law from the Syracuse University College of Law.

It was during his undergraduate studies at the University of Minnesota that he spent two years living abroad. The first of those two years he spent living with Swedish relatives and studying in Växjö, Sweden at S:t Sigfrids Folkhögskola and at Linnéuniversitetet (Linneaus University). Davis spent a second year abroad in Mattersburg, Austria teaching English at the local business school and the local high school, having been awarded a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship. As a result of those years abroad, he became fully fluent both in Swedish and in German, the latter being distinctively colored with an Austrian accent – and, it follows, with an added bonus of being fluently able to speak and understand Austrian dialect. In addition to his fluency in Swedish and German, he can also fluently read and understand spoken Danish and Norwegian.

Politics, public policy, and public service have always played an important role in Davis’s life. It was during his first trip to Europe, at the age of eighteen, that he first connected with the upper levels of Nordic politics and government. At the time, the husband-to-be of a Swedish relative to Davis had recently left a role as an advisor on energy issues to a Swedish Prime Minister and, within a few years, would himself also be elected to the Swedish Parliament. As a result of that relationship and Davis’s own network developed over the years, Davis would come to meet and, in some cases, get to know, over time, a number of MPs, Cabinet Ministers, ambassadors, and other officials in the Swedish and Nordic governments.

It was between undergraduate studies and law school in the United States that Davis was offered his first close-up, full-time foray into American law, politics, public policy, and the legislative process. This came by way of his working as an Assistant at the Minnesota State Senate. One of his contacts befriended during that time, a state senator, was eventually elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a U.S. Congressman for Minnesota. Another of those senate contacts, another state senator, would eventually run for Governor. In the latter case, Davis went on to perform fundraising work for the future candidate for Governor. While, as to the Congressman, Davis would assist him during his years in Congress by supporting the Congressman by attending fundraisers and, with basic and practical campaign work, by walking along with the Congressman in parades or on door-knocking drives, passing out the candidate’s leaflets, in the run-up to elections.

The result was that, very early on, Davis had already begun to develop his first connections into both U.S. and Nordic politics and government - at a significantly high level. The thought dawned early on him, as the working-class son of a plumber, of the inestimable role that pure chance plays in a life. Stated in other terms: One can never know who one might meet in life - nor, perhaps more interestingly, in what ways the careers of oneself and all of the friends one meets along the way in life all eventually can move in common directions and along mutually supportive paths over time.

The thought came once again to play out in reality during and after law school as well, where, among Davis’s circle of friends ended up being a son of a future U.S. President as well as a future cabinet level Presidential appointee, who, prior to his appointment, would act as an advisor to two U.S. Presidents and one Vice President. Over time, other valued and enjoyable friendships at this very same level would also come along - once again, also very much due to pure chance.

Immediately out of law school, for his own part, Davis began a search for a position as a lawyer that would give him an opportunity to work with the Nordic and German-speaking markets. For his first job, from 1995 until 1999, he worked first as a Law Clerk and then as an Associate with the New Jersey and New York City offices of Peri & Stewart, L.L.C., at that time an American affiliate of Føyen & Co. Ans., an Oslo, Norway-based law firm, which, at the time, also had offices in Stockholm and Gothenburg, Sweden and London, England. Though the U.S. office was small, the work performed was as prestigious as that of any of the work performed at any of America's largest firms. The firm represented not only new high-tech Nordic startups entering the U.S. market, but it also represented a number of the top-traded companies on the Nordic stock exchanges. The work was usually in the form of corporate or business law, for the most part, but it also included trademark and copyright work - as well as various forms of business and finance-related litigation, most notably, in one case, for the finance subsidiary of one of Germany's top auto makers.

After returning to Minnesota in 1999, in the years prior to the founding Scandia-Germania-Davis, PLLC, Davis worked as an Associate Attorney with Patterson, Thuente, Skaar and Christensen, P.A., a mid-sized intellectual property law firm located in Minneapolis. Once again, though the firm was not so large, its clients often were. Minnesota, few know, usually holds the unique distinction of having more Fortune 500 companies, per capita, than any other state in the U.S. Thus, a good number of the firm's clients could be found among these. It was here at this firm that Davis began working closely with patent attorneys, one of them being a former Patent Examiner from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

As a non-patent attorney, he assisted patent attorneys in coordinating U.S. and international (PCT) patent strategies for the firm's clients, in the preparation and drafting of patent applications, and, applying his language skills, in the review of key foreign-language prior art. At the same time, his work also focused on the litigation of patents, trademarks, and copyrights as well as of trade secret, unfair competition, antitrust, insurance, and other types of litigation, mostly in the federal courts. Davis also continued, as he had on the East Coast, performing trademark clearance searches and writing registrability opinions, filing and prosecuting applications for trademarks and copyrights, responding to USPTO Office Actions rejecting a trademark, and, when necessary, filing and prosecuting appeals with the Trademark Trial and Appeals Board (TTAB).

Davis has held many of the top positions relating to his chosen career path. For example, aside from having served as Chairman of the Minnesota State Bar Association's International Business Law Section, Chairman of the Swedish-American Chambers of Commerce-MN (SACC-MN), Secretary for the D.C.-based Swedish-American Chambers of Commerce-USA (SACC-USA), as a member of the initial planning group for the founding of the Finnish-American Chambers of Commerce-MN, and as a Board Member of the Royal Norwegian Consulate - Upper Midwest's Business Advisory Board, for nearly ten years Davis also served as an independent advisor to a U.S. Congressman on Nordic matters. The Congressman first invited Davis to become a member of his Foreign Affairs roundtable advisory group after having privately met with Davis and the Swedish Embassy's Trade Attaché during one of Sweden's stints as President of the EU.

During these nearly ten years advising and supporting the Congressman on Nordic issues, Davis regularly facilitated private meetings with and personally introduced the Congressman on Capitol Hill to various Nordic ambassadors in Washington, D.C. He also worked, on a number of occasions, with U.S. Embassy staff in Stockholm, and with his own personal contacts within the Swedish government and the foreign ministry, to plan "Codel" (Congressional Delegation) visits for the Congressman to the Nordic countries. And when an Illinois Congressman headed up efforts to follow Norway's lead and to create the Congressional Friends of Sweden Caucus, Davis himself headed up the efforts to recruit Members of Congress to the caucus on behalf of the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce-USA, which he did in coordination with the Swedish embassy and ambassador.

Over the years, Davis has not only been proposed and supported for nominations within a few U.S. Presidential Administrations, he has also been involved in assisting nominees for Presidential appointments to obtain U.S. Senate confirmation of their nominations at the ambassadorial level.

All of the above has not only resulted in an interesting career for the founder of the firm, but it has also created a firm and a professional background that is hard to find replicated anywhere else – not even within the nation’s largest and finest law and advisory firms.

In considering an entry into a new marketplace, whether an established European business or the start-up client of Europe’s leading law firms, those looking to become active outside of their own domestic home markets – including American companies looking to enter the Nordic and German-speaking markets – must seek out and secure every possible advantage for themselves in those new markets abroad. Such is absolutely necessary to best ensure success in a highly competitive global marketplace.

Scandia-Germania-Davis, PLLC, as a result of its long, broad, and deeply personal knowledge of the Nordic and German-speaking countries is uniquely equipped to provide its European clients entering the U.S., and U.S. companies heading for Europe, with the all-important and necessary advantages required to achieve success.

The law firm achieves this not only by applying high level legal knowledge and its over twenty years of experience representing clients from each of these countries. It also brings with it the practical wisdom gleaned from day-to-day work for clients from many nations and varying backgrounds all grounded in highly particular cross-border insights the law firm has built up over time that reach into the heart of both the local and global industries in which its clients’ companies compete.

Though the firm offers its services in all areas of business, industry, government, and commerce, it has developed special experience in serving companies and entrepreneurs whose activities are rooted in the medical and healthcare, IT, energy, defense, consumer products, and the creatives and artistic sectors.

With strong experience and good relationships into all of the Nordic and German-speaking countries, the firm offers a fully integrated, proactive style of meeting clients’ legal and business needs case-by-case, day-after-day, in both directions across the Atlantic.