John “Jack” Penny, former chair of Nutter McClennen & Fish's intellectual property department, is joining Womble Bond Dickinson as it looks to expand its Boston office.

Penny is joining Womble as a partner in its IP practice group.

Opened only a month before the trans-Atlantic merger that created Womble Bond Dickinson late last year, the firm's Boston office was its first in New England. The office quickly added a trio of IP partners from McCarter & English. With Penny's addition, Womble has grown to 13 attorneys in Beantown in less than a year.

A former control systems engineer for the Hughes Aircraft Co., Penny said he lucked into his career in patent law.

“A design I was working on as an engineer got involved in patent infringement issues,” Penny said.

“So I actually had to work with patent lawyers [to] try and redesign components of the satellite I was designing,” he said, adding that he considers himself both an engineer and a patent attorney.

Penny began his legal career at Washington, D.C.-based intellectual property firm Sughrue Mion in 1994 before heading to Locke Lord predecessor firm Edwards Wildman Palmer in 2002. Seven years later, Penny joined Nutter, a full-service firm based in Boston, becoming head of its IP department in 2014.

Over the years, Penny has built a practice working with clients on a wide array of patent-related services, including the development and management of strategic patent portfolios, patent litigation and patent prosecution, among other matters. His client base includes European, Korean and Japanese and U.S. companies in the electric, mechanical and electro-mechanical industries.

After Womble established itself in Boston, Penny learned that the firm was looking to expand beyond a life sciences and biotechnology focus in the city and build out expertise in the electrical and mechanical engineering areas.

“He's really taking us in a different direction,” said Sarah Keefe, managing partner of the office. While the firm already has a robust technology sector practice, Keefe said it hasn't represented that sector out of its Boston office. The firm said Penny's addition will allow it to tie together services offered through its West Coast, East Coast and European locations.

That promise of a global platform also attracted Penny.

“I have a lot of clients in Europe, and this gives me a much easier way to focus on the European client base,” Penny said.

Womble Bond Dickinson's U.K.-based clients and attorneys have been clamoring for access to the Boston market, Keefe said.

“Boston and the commonwealth of Massachusetts are a significant trading partner with the U.K.,” she said. “Although it's a small state, it really has a significant profile within the U.K. [and] U.K. companies are very interested in access to capital that's in the Boston market [and] access to the research facilities.”

Keefe believes straddling the U.S. and the U.K. gives Womble Bond Dickinson an advantage over some other firms that have recently set up shop in Boston.

“It is competitive,” Keefe said of the Boston legal market, noting that the firm plans on making two additional hires there whom she declined to identify.

“I think we've got a compelling story to tell and we've been successful to date,” she said.