For Crowell & Moring, 2017 has been a year of national expansion on both coasts, primarily through a bevy of lateral partner hires.

The firm, which in April broke off merger talks with New York's Herrick, Feinstein, officially shuttered offices in Alaska and Wyoming in January. But those moves preceded Crowell & Moring's recruitment frenzy, which touched on California this summer when the firm added a pair of litigators from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe in Los Angeles.

Crowell & Moring is now poised to expand its presence in the Golden State through its addition of Arent Fox litigation partners Arthur Beeman and Joel Muchmore in San Francisco. Beeman served as head of his former firm's complex litigation and intellectual property practices for Northern California. Muchmore was promoted to partner at Arent Fox earlier this year.

“Crowell & Moring has a reputation that I have known and admired for many years,” said Muchmore, who joined Arent Fox in 2013 after working as a senior managing associate in Dentons' complex litigation and IP group in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. But the opportunity to continue working with Beeman, who Muchmore knows well, and build out a practice at a new firm keen on growing on the West Coast was one he couldn't pass up.

Beeman and Muchmore specialize in the trial and management of IP in the trade secrets and litigation arena. Both have represented Fortune 500 consumer products companies, electronics retailers and licensees in major disputes, including serving as counsel for Mars Inc. in its suit against Oracle Corp. over the latter's audit tactics.

Beeman, who was managing partner of Dentons' Silicon Valley office and chair of the global legal giant's patent litigation practice before jumping to Arent Fox in 2013 alongside Muchmore, said their move to Crowell & Morning was predicated on the firm's ability within the IP space to represent both plaintiffs and defendants and its willingness to partner with clients in alternative fee arrangements, which have increasingly become a larger part of their practice.

“[Our clients] have been startups, we've even had individual inventors, medium-sized technology companies looking for an edge in their market and believing their intellectual property is that edge that will allow them to gain a market share,” Beeman said. “For that matter, even the major technology companies themselves … in the market are looking for lawyers who will sit down and talk to them about alternative fee arrangements.”

Beeman and Muchmore, who declined to discuss the name of the recruiter who helped broker their move to Crowell & Moring, come to the firm the same week that it welcomed aboard Morgan, Lewis & Bockius corporate and business finance partner Amy Comer in London.

“[Beeman] and [Muchmore] are one of the premier litigation teams in California,” said a statement by Crowell & Moring chair Angela Styles, who earlier this year spoke about how her firm used contingency work to bolster its bottom line in 2016. “They have successfully tried numerous cases to verdict, and their combined experience adds new depth and dimension to our litigation capabilities on the West Coast and nationally.”

National expansion with a focus on business and regulatory centers has been a key focus for Crowell & Moring this year.

In July, the firm added Juan Arteaga, deputy assistant attorney general for civil enforcement at the U.S. Department of Justice, as an antitrust partner in New York. That same month Crowell & Moring hired Dentons insurance partner John Sarchio and senior counsel Richard Liskov in the same city. Earlier this year, Crowell & Moring picked up Peter Gray, co-chair of Dentons' U.S. environment and natural resources group, and partner-turned-senior counsel John Conner Jr. in Washington, D.C.

In August, Crowell & Moring added white-collar and regulatory enforcement partner Rebecca Ricigliano in New York from the New Jersey Department of Law and Public Safety. September saw the firm add Alexis Gilman, an assistant director in the Federal Trade Commission's competition bureau, as an antitrust partner in Washington, D.C. And earlier this month Crowell & Moring landed cybersecurity and data privacy senior counsel Maarten Stassen in Brussels from global accounting giant Deloitte LLP.

California has also been a rich hiring ground for Crowell & Moring, as the firm reeled in Paul Rosen, a former chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in May as a partner for its white-collar and regulatory enforcement group in Los Angeles. Crowell & Moring brought on Charles Schwenk, a well-traveled energy partner at several Big Law locales, in August as senior counsel for its project development and finance group in Irvine, California.