Think Global, Live Local: The Big Picture!

International law, early starts and a passion for community: Jean-François Harvey is a man who rarely sits still - unless there's a magazine and a scotch involved. Elizabeth Kerr reports

Jean-François Harvey is not a fan of the winter. Sitting in his Wanchai office he recalls when he first discovered the gentle minus-5 degrees of Hokkaido's ski season. He wondered why he'd spent so much time skiing in minus-25 Québec. Then he jokes about time travelling and, like any good lawyer, bringing a class action lawsuit against Jacques Cartier, the explorer who 'discovered' Canada.

"The first time Cartier came he lost most of his people. He came back!" he exclaims with a laugh.

"There were about 3,000 people in Québec at the time, and all of North America was empty except for Native peoples of course. He could have gone just a little farther south," he rolls his eyes before quipping, "What do the Swedish say? 'There is no bad weather, just bad clothes.

Jean-François, aka JFH, only looks like a lawyer because of the leather and wood desk he's seated behind, the kind of heavy furniture you see on television procedurals. He's intensely new-world Gallic: clipped silver hair and relaxed jeans giving him a more Jean-Paul Belmondo than barrister look.

But JFH juggles roles; founder and managing partner of Harvey Law Group (harveylawcorporation.com), one of the most prominent investment immigration and business law firms on the planet; 25-year Hong Kong resident and founder of Discovery Bay’s HLG Kart Race (the next one is on the 21st of this month, www.hlgkartrace.com); the newly minted owner of Around DB (arounddb.com). Why did he want to buy a magazine?

“I didn’t want to buy a magazine.” More on that in a bit.

JFH took a leisurely if direct route to Hong Kong and DB a quarter of a century ago. The native of Lac-Saint-Jean, just north of Québec City, graduated from the University of Ottawa – no surprise given his father was a Superior Court of Canada judge – and relocated to Montréal, where the seeds of Harvey Law Group (HLG) sprouted in 1992. Before that he was working at a law firm near the city’s Chinatown, which become a regular lunch spot. Quite out of the blue, a restaurant owner asked for some legal advice about a commercial lease. And then another query came. And another. “After a year, someone asked, ‘Can you help my cousin move here?’ So that’s how the immigration practice started.”

JFH’s first case and first trip to Hong Kong came in 1993, and now it’s the global headquarters of his superstar law firm that boasts offices in Bangkok, Paris, Miami, Johannesburg and 11 others.

Work aside, JFH became enamoured with Hong Kong’s streamlined and low-rate tax system – “I’m Canadian, don’t forget. We do pay taxes,” he cracks with a raised eyebrow – among other things the city had to offer. He cites his team, many of whom have been with him for 15+ years; a dedicated and professional staff of lawyers; and the vibrant and varied way of life Hong Kong delivers.

“I used to live in Wanchai and I loved the early morning, going to the market. You go in and after a month people recognise you, they say ‘Hi.’ When my children started to grow, I said, ‘Okay, where can we go where they can ride a bike without me having a heart attack?’ We found Discovery Bay. It’s an incredible place for the kids; it’s unique. A lot of people complain about DB, and I always tell them the same thing. ‘Nobody forced you to live here.’ Maybe it’s just human nature. Talk to any DB restaurant owner when they open and they’re terrified, particularly of the local Facebook groups.” He pauses. “Why would you go to a new restaurant within the first month anyway? Come on.”

HLG does most of its Hong Kong work out of its Wanchai location but JFH opened a DB branch purely based on demand. It made him and HLG a fixture in DB, which led to creating the HLG Kart Race, a community event that, 11 years after its establishment, is a DB calendar staple. Roughly 100 kids aged seven to 12 compete in over 300 individual races during the full-day event. That fixture status also brought him to Around DB.

In JFH’s eyes, Around DB has long been an intrinsic par t of community life. Despite social media, it still connects people – it’s somewhere to discover local stories, spot familiar faces and find out what’s happening in the coming weeks. Everyone noticed when it vanished for a month in early 2025, then two. “Our CFO here was nice enough to spend some time trying to figure out if it was viable or not,” he says. “We had to buy it for the community.”

As it stands Around DB is a work-in-progress, with JFH’s publishing team toying with ways to be more eco-friendly, perhaps bilingual, possibly more outward-looking and of course more profitable. But he’s committed to it.

“I’m a big fan of The Economist. I love to sit down with my paper copy and my scotch and read the magazine. Maybe three scotches depending how bad the news is,” he reasons with a chuckle. “And funnily enough, kids love magazines. I was talking to someone in the DB office yesterday and she was telling me her five-year-old has been collecting copies of Around DB since they moved there a year ago. He has a whole collection in his bedroom. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a backlash to so much digital tech. A paper magazine has no notifications, no buzzing, no vibrating. You can set it aside and when you open it again there are no new ads, nothing’s changed.”

Where he finds time for all the extracurriculars is anyone’s guess. JFH works a lot, posting 70- to 75- hour work weeks by his own estimate, and he’s on a flight somewhere about 100 times each year. But if that makes him sound like a tunnel-visioned work machine (not very Québecois) that’s inaccurate.

He spends three months every summer in Lac- Saint-Jean – sailing, fishing, working on the house and the land; he loves building and welding, what he calls handiwork; and he’s a self-confessed petrol head. His kids, ranging from 11 to 30, used to joke that he went to the airport more often than the 7-Eleven. “But I ask how many of their friends’ dads spend three months a year on vacation with them? They get to the point where they complain I spend too much time with them, so,” he shrugs.

Though he’s clocking 75 hours a week in the office, JFH’s putting a scant 35 into sleep, up every day at 4.15am and wrapping up an eight-hour workday by lunch. “It permits me to talk to my people. Florida is open, Vancouver is open. And sometimes I catch friends before they go to bed or last thing in the afternoon,” he says.

“It’s a good way to start the day and I can do two-hour business lunches. I do like my wine.” Finally, he sounds Québecois.