King & Spalding's Atlanta headquarters. Photo: John Disney/ ALM

Four corporate partners have left Morrison & Foerster's soon-to-be shuttered Northern Virginia office to join King & Spalding's Washington, D.C., office.

Larry Yanowitch, Charles Katz, Tom Knox and Jeremy Schropp have all been together at Morrison & Foerster since leaving Shaw Pittman in 2005 in advance of that firm's acquisition by Pillsbury Winthrop.

For King & Spalding, the new hires are an opportunity for the firm to bolster its corporate practice and broaden its technology offerings.

"One of our focuses as a group is to expand our capabilities in M&A, particularly around deals revolving around venture capital, private equity and aerospace, defense and government services," said corporate, finance and investments practice group leader Todd Holleman.

Yanowitch has a reputation as one of the top aerospace, defense and government services mergers and acquisitions experts in the market. Katz advised government contractor Science Applications International Corp. in its $2.5 billion 2018 acquisition of competing tech services firm Engility Holdings. Knox focuses on technology transactions and outsourcing. Schroop, the youngest partner in the group, has built his own practice focused on M&A involving government contractors.

Knox noted that like all partners with successful practices, the team was frequently on the receiving end of entreaties to move elsewhere but was very happy at Morrison & Foerster. But an approach from King & Spalding after the firm added private equity partner Jonathan Melmed in New York last year piqued their interest.

"As we learned about the firm, we became more and more impressed with it and the vision the firm has for building a great platform on top of the global presence that it already has," Knox said. "We also noticed that the firm has made an aggressive push into augmenting its already terrific corporate and technology transactions capabilities."

The firm's 2017 hire of M&A superstar Jim Woolery also served as a signal of its ambitions, he added.

Discussions engineering the move unfolded alongside the machinations behind Morrison & Foerster's recent announcement it would be closing its Northern Virginia office and merging it with its Washington, D.C., location when the firm relocates in the District next year, Knox said.

But the team is not abandoning tech-rich Northern Virginia even as they temporarily move into King & Spalding's downtown office just a block from the White House. By the start of 2020, the firm will be leasing space back on the other side of the Potomac River.

"That's a community that Larry and I have been a part of for over 30 years. We helped to grow it and are very loyal to it," Knox said, noting that in addition to Northern Virginia, suburban Maryland and D.C. itself have all seen a tech boom in recent years.

The group is bringing clients including SAIC, defense contractor ManTech International, and management and IT consultants Booz Allen along to King & Spalding, as well as emerging companies like Sonatype, ThreatQuotient, Fugue and Qomplex,

Holleman said that also he expected the number of lawyers joining King & Spalding to grow. While there are currently eight corporate associates in Morrison & Foerster's Northern Virginia office, he said it was too early to say if any of them might be joining.

But staying put, at least initially, will be three attorneys who had also made the 2005 move from Shaw Pittman to Morrison & Forester: partner Gregory Giammittorio and senior counsel John Harper and Jack Lewis. The three did not respond to inquiries Monday.

"Morrison & Foerster has more than 150 attorneys in the Washington, D.C., area. We look forward to continued growth in the D.C. area as we get ready to move into our new state-of-the-art D.C. office that is opening in the Fall 2020," a spokesperson for the firm said.

King & Spalding D.C. managing partner Mark Jensen noted that the hires are the "third leg of the stool" complementing the elite teams of regulatory lawyers and trial lawyers the firm already has in the office. The move comes on the heels of former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, former FBI chief of staff Zack Harmon, and former U.S. Trade Representative general counsel Stephen Vaughn returning to the firm in recent months.

"A lot of firms haven't invested as much in M&A and corporate in the D.C. region, and it's not clear to me that it's as much of a focus for others as it is for us," he said. "The D.C. metro area is an extraordinary hotbed of innovation in technology and defense."

Beyond just the Washington area, Holleman noted the hires will help the firm continue to take advantage of a tech wave that is sweeping the south. He pointed to the Charlotte office, servicing the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, the firm's Atlanta base, with ties to Georgia Tech and proximity to Nashville's burgeoning health care-focused tech sector, as well as the firm's offices in Houston and Austin.

"We believe we're positioned to be the tech firm of the southern belt of the eastern U.S., and this leverages what we've done in Silicon Valley and helps us expand that effort," he said.

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