Sheppard Adds 15-Lawyer Perkins Coie IP Litigation Team

Sheppard has hired a 15-lawyer intellectual property litigation team from Perkins Coie, continuing its aggressive buildout of its high-stakes patent litigation and trials practice, the firm said in a release on Thursday.

The hires include partners Veronica Ascarrunz, Robin Brewer, Andrew Klein, Tom Millikan and Joseph Reid. The lawyers are based across Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Del Mar, California.

It’s the second group Sheppard has hired from Perkins Coie’s IP litigation practice, following the hire in June of the three-partner team of David Fournier, Allison Glasunow, and Kourtney Mueller Merrill. Sheppard also recruited a 21-lawyer IP litigation group from Ropes & Gray in September.

The departures from Perkins Coie come amid the firm’s merger with UK-founded Ashurst. Partners at the two firms this month voted to combine the firms, resulting in a $2.8 billion, 3,000-lawyer entity that will be formed later this year. Millikan in an interview said the merger or the timing of that vote did not impact the group’s decision to join Sheppard, which recently rebranded from its formal name of Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP.

“With one of the largest and most preeminent patent litigation practices in the country, this team further enhances our ability to deliver winning results for innovation-driven clients in their most critical disputes,” Sheppard chair Luca Salvi said in a statement.

A spokesperson from Perkins Coie said the firm is grateful for the lawyers’ contributions and wished them well.

The team is known for handling multi-forum patent litigation strategies, handling matters in front of the International Trade Commission (ITC), district courts, and the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. They have experience in standard-essential patents and fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing matters.

Sheppard’s hires came after many of the lawyers worked together on two trials between Amazon and Nokia in the ITC over patented video-streaming technology. Perkins and Sheppard were part of Amazon’s legal team in those trials. Some of the Ropes lawyers who joined Sheppard were also involved in the cases, Ascarrunz said. The cases were settled last year.

“You could visibly see the investment the firm was making in its IP litigation practice,” Ascarrunz said in an interview. “It was a fantastic opportunity to reconnect with the Perkins and Ropes folks.”

Ascarrunz and Brewer will co-lead Sheppard’s ITC practice. She said the venue, which handles patent disputes and can protect domestic industry by restricting imports, is having a moment. It’s on pace so far this year to see a more than 200% increase in filings compared to recent years, she said.

Rulings last year by the US Circuit Court for the Federal Circuit have expanded access to the court for more industries, and some see it as dovetailing with the Trump administration’s push to bolster domestic manufacturing.

Millikan has worked with Sheppard lawyers on behalf of Amazon.com Inc. in disputes against Nokia and InterDigital over standard-essential patents and FRAND licensing issues, Sheppard’s release said.

Much of that litigation has centered around video compression technology for streaming services and is being fought around the world, including in the UK, Germany, India and Brazil, Millikan said in an interview.

“Sheppard has expertise in helping guide clients through those very sophisticated international matters,” he said.

Sheppard has been heavily investing in litigation practices in recent years, riding a surge in demand for courtroom lawyers that across the industry has been more consistent than demand growth for corporate or M&A lawyers.

Headcount in Sheppard’s business litigation department rose nearly 18% from 2024 to the third quarter last year, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis. That was one of the highest growth rates among litigation departments at the largest 50 law firms by revenue.

Sheppard’s revenue last year rose more than 13% to more than $1.3 billion, according to The American Lawyer.