Antitrust and IP boutique Axinn, Veltrop & Harkrider LLP is branching out to the West Coast, opening a San Francisco office to be closer to technology clients like Google.
The firm, which already has offices in New York, Washington, and Hartford, has now planted a flag in the heart of the Bay Area, where it plans to grow aggressively.
“The demand for our antitrust services and expertise is unprecedented,” said antitrust partner Daniel Bitton, who will lead the new office with IP partner Jason Murata. “We’ve seen explosive growth, not just in antitrust M&A work, but also the litigation and cartel side.”
Bitton has helped to clear antitrust hurdles on Dell’s $67 billion acquisition of EMC and on McKesson’s $3.4 billion joint venture with Change Healthcare.
He has also advised Google on litigation, government investigations and several transactions, including the $700 million acquisition of ITA software and the $2.35 billion sale of its Motorola Home division.
Bitton will move to San Francisco to be closer to clients like Google and McKesson and also to broaden his client base.
“If you look at [antitrust] trends and what the agencies in the U.S. and overseas are looking at, it’s technology and health care and life sciences,” he told Bloomberg Law.
Axinn also hopes to court clients in those industries with its IP practice, which runs the gamut of technologies but is heavily focused on life sciences.
The firm has served as lead patent litigation and FDA counsel for Johnson & Johnson, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Unilever and Momenta Pharmaceuticals.
“We plan to focus a lot of our energy in growing our San Francisco office and would like to see it develop and be comparable in size to our East Coast offices,” said Matthew Becker, Axinn’s managing partner.
The firm currently has approximately 80-90 lawyers across its offices.
The new San Francisco office is starting with four attorneys, but Bitton says he hopes to more than double the ranks in the coming year.
It plans to recruit heavily from California law schools, including Berkeley, Stanford and UCLA.
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