LEGAL MOTIONS
Brobeck Phleger: Six Attorneys Laid Off;
By CHRIS CZIBORR
The Irvine office of San Francisco-based law firm Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison LLP at the beginning of the month handed out pink slips to six of its associate attorneys and six staff members, as part of a firm-wide cutback.
“We were affected by the firm-wide reduction in force on Feb. 1,” said Kathlene Lowe, managing partner of Brobeck’s Irvine office.
The reduction comes as a result of the die-off among emerging growth companies,especially dot-coms, according to Lowe. Brobeck in 1999 and 2000 had aggressively added staff and marketed itself as a leading high-tech practice.
“With the demise of that sector of the economy, our corporate practice was likewise affected on the downside,” Lowe said. “We carried excess capacity for about a year waiting for the economy to turn back around.”
The Irvine layoffs took place solely in the firm’s corporate transactional practice, which was particularly hard-hit by the dot-com meltdown. And most of the reductions firm-wide will come in Brobeck’s business and technology practice.
“We attempted to implement every other cost saving we could devise to try to avoid layoffs,” Lowe said, including a voluntary sabbatical program and, more recently, a separation incentive package for associates that provided several months of compensation to eligible associates who elected to depart from the firm.
“But eventually we concluded that the time had come that we needed to shed a substantial portion of our excess capacity and return to our previous business model,” she said.
The terminations totaled more than 10% of the associates at Brobeck’s Irvine office. Firm-wide, about 50 associates and 85 staff were laid off. Associates included in the reduction are eligible to receive three months’ severance. Affected staff are eligible to receive severance of two weeks’ salary for every year of employment at the firm. The firm also is providing outplacement counseling and other benefits.
“This is something that was extremely painful for us to do,” Lowe said. “We did everything we could think of to avoid it for a year,including keeping people part-time,and we finally concluded that the economy was not recovering as quickly as we hoped it would, and that this was the next step we had to take.”
Lowe said she still expects the economy to bounce back, albeit slowly.
“We’ve positioned ourselves to grow back with the economy, but at a steadier and less volatile pace,” she said.
Brobeck is a an international law firm, with more than 750 attorneys in 14 offices in the U.S. as well as joint venture Brobeck Hale and Dorr offices in London and Oxford, England and Munich, Germany.
The firm’s principal service areas include business and technology; intellectual property litigation; securities litigation; complex business litigation; labor and employment; commerce and finance; real estate; insurance coverage; taxation; executive compensation and employee benefits.
LEGAL MOTIONS
Levin & Hawes: IP Firm Plans Expansion
By CHRIS CZIBORR
Laguna Beach law firm Levin & Hawes recently opened a San Diego office and plans to open an additional pair of offices in the next few months in Huntington Beach and Palm Springs.
The firm, an intellectual property boutique focusing mainly on litigation, is seeing an upswing in work because of the current economic down-turn.
“Companies now are a lot more eager to protect their intellectual property and derive capital from IP litigation,” said William Levin, managing partner of Levin & Hawes.
Levin & Hawes also is looking to absorb smaller intellectual property firms in the next year, including San Diego biotechnology patent prosecution firm Dave Preston & Associates, according to Levin.
“We’re also looking for other small one-to-three person law firms to absorb,” he said.
Levin & Hawes has added four attorneys in the past year and expects to add more to head its new offices. The firm counts 14 Orange County attorneys.
The firm’s revenue last year doubled from the previous year’s total, and Levin said he expects a further 50% gain this year.
Levin said that’s partly being driven by companies with problems related to the dot-com sector, but the firm also is picking up work in other sectors.
The firm handled the litigation of San Luis Obispo-based Mexican restaurant Tortilla Flats against Long Beach-based El Torito Restaurants Inc., Laguna Hills-based Del Taco Inc. and other restaurants over the use of the phrase, “Taco Tuesday.”
“We’ve had a lot of seven-figure settlements,some of the settlements were more than the value of the business,” Levin said. “We like picking big, high-profile cases.”
Other past cases included a landmark trademark verdict a few years ago worth $143 million against Pfizer Inc. Levin & Hawes represented the plaintiff, U.K.-based Trovan Ltd., maker of the Trovan antibiotic that it claimed Pfizer had planned to introduce using the “Trovan” trademark without permission.
The firm also is doing intellectual property work for Aliso Viejo dot-com Superbrands, part of a network of Microsoft Corp.’s Expedia.com Web sites.
Levin & Hawes competes with larger firms such as Los Angeles-based Latham & Watkins as well as well intellectual property boutiques like Newport-beach based Knobbe, Martens, Olson & Bear LLP.
Founded in 1996, Levin & Hawes has recruited attorneys from firms incloding Marina del Rey-based Berger, Kahn, Shafton, Moss, Figler, Simon & Gladstone, as well as the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
