The law firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati has added five patent litigation partners from Sidley Austin, according to Reuters. The five partners were added to open the firm’s office in Los Angeles.
Edward Poplawski leads the team. He was the former Sidley West Coast intellectual property team leader. Other partners joining the firm include Vera Elson, Paul Tripodi, Olivia Kim and Sandra Fujiyama.
Douglas Clark, the managing partner at Wilson Sonsini, said that the firm was interested in the first-chair trial experience from Poplawski. The office is expected to open in April.
The co-chair of Sidley’s executive committee, Carter Phillips, said he offered the partners well wishes and understood the attraction of opening a brand new office for a firm such as Wilson Sonsini. Sidley has 18 intellectual property partners working in California and more than 100 intellectual property attorneys in the entire firm. Phillips said that because the practice is so large, the departure of the attorneys should be “fairly negligible.”
The office for Wilson Sonsini in Los Angeles is going to be the 14th for the firm. The profits per partner at Wilson Sonsini dropped by seven percent in 2012 to roughly $1.6 million. This number was provided by The Recorder, which is a segment of American Lawyer Media. At Sidley, the profits per partner increased by 12 percent to roughly $1.8 million.