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If you were to ask Daniel Soulez Larivière what makes it possible for a lawyer to efficiently and competently handle an important affair of state, he would reply: "The first condition is that the State only requires one thing from you: that you do the whole of your job (and nothing else), thus enabling you to handle the extraordinary case for which you have been instructed as an ordinary case."

Since founding his own firm in 1969, he has handled a large number of cases attracting considerable media coverage, which are now well known to the public. Between the case of Eugène Rousseau, a former warrant officer with the French intelligence service, wrongly accused of treason, whom he was appointed to defend by the court when he first started his firm, and his defence today of Total in the cases arising from the sinking of the Erika or the explosion at the AZF factory in Toulouse, he was involved in a case that he believes marked a turning point in his career: that of the Rainbow Warrior. In that case, in New Zealand, he represented two "genuine" spies: the spies, who had posed as "Mr & Mrs Turenge", pleaded guilty as part of a plea bargain in which the main charges were dropped. Daniel Soulez Larivière handled this affair of state just "as if it had been an ordinary case, by applying the law, and observing the same code of conduct and confidentiality obligations as apply in the most ordinary of cases."

For Daniel Soulez Larivière, the 1980s were a transition period. Firstly, thanks to the Rainbow Warrior case in 1985, which strengthened even further his reputation for handling "critical" cases of every kind, but also thanks to the success of his book, "L’Avocature", a standard reference work dealing with the subject of lawyers and justice, published in 1982, which fostered the recruitment of his three current partners.

Simon Foreman was the first to join him, in 1988. Chantal Bonnard arrived a year later, in 1989, through Simon Foreman, who she had met at Arnaud Lyon-Caen. At the end of 1991, Mauricia Courrégé made an unsolicited application to the firm, and was immediately taken on.

These years during the late 80s mark the distinction between two periods: "before", in which Daniel Soulez Larivière more often than not handled his main cases on his own (for a period of about ten years); and "after", when the firm consisted of a genuine team, where no member worked alone or in a specific practice area, and where the members were strengthened by this team solidarity and the complementary nature of their skills and knowledge.