Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough has hired a nine-lawyer litigation team from Tucker Ellis to open its 31st US office, in Cleveland. 

The South Carolina-headquartered firm’s Cleveland office will house eight of the new arrivals, including six partners, while partner Monee Hanna will be joining the firm’s Los Angeles office.

The addition of Hanna and partners Sarah Bunce, Jon Feczko, John Lewis, Seth Linnick and Dustin Rawlin brings Nelson Mullins’ product liability practice headcount to more than 160 nationwide. The group specialises in the pharmaceutical and medical device sectors handling commercial litigation and class action work and will be launching the Cleveland office with three associates, also from Tucker Ellis.

More attorneys and support staff are expected to join the Cleveland office in due course, the firm said. 

Nelson Mullins also opened offices in Minneapolis, San Diego and Richmond when it hired 31 partners from trial law firm Bowman and Brooke in January. 

“We have seen strong growth in our litigation practice, most notably in product liability, in the first quarter of 2022,” said managing partner Jim Lehman. 

The firm plans to “continue to invest in teams like this with strong synergies to our existing practice in response to the expanding needs of our clients”, Lehman added. 

Rawlin, who previously practised alongside Bunce, Feczko, Lewis and Linnick at Jones Day, which is also based in Cleveland, said the opportunity to open an office in the team’s shared hometown of Cleveland was “simply too good to pass up”. 

“We look forward to providing world class service to our clients, many of whom call Northeast Ohio home,” he said. 

Nelson Mullins lost the head of its life sciences patent practice, Amy Baker Mandragouras, to Cooley last year when the Silicon Valley firm hired away a team of patent lawyers to boost its patent counselling and prosecution practice in Boston.