IP heavy-hitter Fish & Richardson is opening an office in Chicago, housing partners the firm hired last year from Jenner & Block.
The new office – the 350-lawyer firm’s 15th globally – will open this spring with a five-strong team. It will be led by Louis Fogel, a patent litigator who joined Fish & Richardson last February from Jenner, where he was co-chair of its life sciences practice.
“Chicago has long been a hub of Fish activity,” said Fish & Richardson president and chief executive officer, John Adkisson. “We are very active in the Northern District of Illinois, serve many clients in the Chicago area, and have four attorneys practising from Chicago. It’s a natural next step to offer an office to support local colleagues and clients, as well as frequent visitors from other Fish offices.”
The Chicago team also includes partner Shaun Van Horn, an IP litigator who moved over with Fogel from Jenner, of counsel Giordana Mahn, an associate and a technology specialist.
Fish & Richardson said the hire of Fogel and Van Horn, both of whom have roots in Chicago, provided momentum for establishing an official on-the-ground presence in the city.
It added that establishing an office in Chicago would broaden its ability to counsel clients across the region, which has experienced significant growth in the technology and life sciences sectors in recent years and is the third-largest legal market in the US.
“Chicago’s robust legal market is expected to serve as a long-term source of lateral talent,” the firm added in a statement.
Other law firms building in Chicago recently include Willkie Farr & Gallagher, which hired an 11-strong capital markets and M&A team including four partners in the city last August from Mayer Brown. Earlier in the year UK-based firm Clyde & Co recruited a nine-strong team in Chicago from Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith to boost its insurance offering across North America.
Including its new office, Boston-based Fish & Richardson will have 13 bases across the US, alongside an office in Munich and a base in the booming southern Chinese city of Shenzhen that it opened in 2019.
The firm litigates more patent cases than any other law firm in the US, Bloomberg Law reported, and over the past five years had 58 patent matters in the Northern District of Illinois.
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