The Lawyer is reporting that IP litigator Bill Coats is decamping from White & Case to create a Silicon Valley office for Kaye Scholer.
That’s the second IP/IT loss for W&C in a week, after losing Steve Betensky.
At least Coats (USF BA ’72, Hastings JD ’80), is not going to Latham & Watkins. Latham has picked off 14 W&C partners in recent months.
More about W&C’s departures – including losses in the IP group going back 10 years, after the jump.
Back in September we wrote about the firm’s problems (and that was long before this raft of departures), including how IP partner Dimitrios Drivas was stepping off the executive committee for London’s Oliver Brettle.
We actually believe Verrier when he says that it doesn’t signal anything bad about the IP practice – this was pure scrambling to shore up London. … The IP group has also suffered its own share of departures, going back to losing the head of the practice, Ed Filardi to Skadden 10 years ago, Bob Raskopf to Quinn Emanuel a few years ago, and more recently Jonathan Moskin to Foley & Lardner in August, and three IP litigators who just left for Cooley Godward.
So now we’re not sure about whether Drivas’s stepping off the committee signals anything. At least it will give him time to focus on stanching the bleeding.
Drivas and Eric Berg, who is trying to stabilize the banking practice, will certainly have a lot of commiserating to do.
The Law Shucks Lateral Tracker has 25 White & Case partners leaving the firm since September, which doesn’t even include the four IP lawyers last summer.
