DLA Piper has scored a major lateral hire by recruiting a team of 30 patent lawyers from its global rival Dentons.
The team’s previous clients have included Apple Inc and Whirlpool Corp. The team is led by partners Peter Yim, Christopher Eide, Brian Ho, Randy Omid, Michael Swett, and Parker Kuhl, and includes six patent agents, technical advisors, and 24 other lawyers, as well as 15 professional staffers.
The team will be based in DLA Piper’s offices in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Seattle, and they have experience in patent litigation in several international jurisdictions including the UK, Germany, Japan, and China.
According to Yim, joining DLA Piper will allow the team to expand their patent work beyond prosecution. At Dentons, the team’s focus was mainly on one client, which Yim declined to identify but most of the team’s clients, which includes Novartis AG, Tesla Inc, and VMware Inc, are coming with them to DLA Piper.
Yim and Ho represented Apple in a dispute with the US Patent and Trademark Office regarding the company’s patent application for the “hold and drag” system of rearranging icons on an iPhone.
