Chicago. Photo: Antwon McMullen/Shutterstock.com

The writing was on the wall only a year after Richard McCaulley and Anthony Dowell started their boutique intellectual property firm in Chicago.

McCaulley Dowell is no more, a little more than a year after the IP boutique launched. The firm's website is offline and its two name partners have taken jobs with other firms located thousands of miles apart.

But both McCaulley, who has joined the IP boutique firm Haley Guiliano in San Jose, California, and Dowell, an attorney/of counsel at Gutwein Law in Lafayette, Indiana, said there's no bitterness or bad feelings about the venture. Both men said they are happy where they are now, and the two Notre Dame Law School classmates remain good friends.

Joining Haley Guiliano is a homecoming of sorts for McCaulley. The firm is a spinoff of Ropes & Gray's IP practice, which McCaulley previously chaired before he left to create his boutique with Dowell. As a result, McCaulley has a lot of friends at the firm who have welcomed him with open arms.

"These are close colleagues of mine," McCaulley said. "Still going to have the same practice, still going to have the same clients, the same vision, but leveraging the people they have. They have a lot of technical advisers and associates who are wonderful for my matters. That was really the motivating factor."

McCaulley Dowell was profitable and had a couple of associates and a chief financial officer, Dowell said. But the firm was never able to make enough money to justify hiring more associates, which made it difficult to take on more cases representing plaintiffs in patent-protection cases,

"We didn't take off as fast as we would like and didn't get the business we were hoping for," Dowell said. "I needed to look for other types of litigation to do and landed at Gutwein."

It became a vicious cycle of sorts: The firm's small size made it difficult for them to take on bigger cases, which in turn made it harder for them to attract talent.

"Clients want to see a bigger team," McCaulley said. "It's hard as a small staff to keep the best talent. That was really the main reason for hooking up with my mates at Haley Guiliano."

Years of changes in federal law aimed at stymieing so-called patent trolls and adverse court decisions have made it harder for plaintiffs to pursue cases against companies that have allegedly ripped off their IP, largely due to greater procedural hurdles, like forcing plaintiffs to file patent cases in the federal district where the defendants are located, Dowell said.

"That has become a dying business," Dowell said. "It's been very difficult with some Supreme Court rulings and changes to federal law in 2012."

Dowell said patent enforcement litigation is still being waged, but it's a "fraction of what it was five or 10 years ago."

In August, Gutwein Law's only other litigator left that firm, so Dowell jumped at the chance to run the 15-person firm's litigation department. Dowell said he has a long relationship with Stuart and Andrew Gutwein, the namesakes of his new firm.

The move to Lafayette was natural for Dowell; he ran his own law firm, Dowell Baker, for 10 years before moving to Chicago in 2014. In the Windy City, Dowell was briefly an of counsel at Taft Stettinius & Hollister and a partner at then-Niro, McAndrews, Dowell & Grossman—a spinoff created by the son of prolific patent plaintiffs lawyer Raymond Niro—before he created his own firm, Dowell IP, in May 2015.

"It's been fun," Dowell said about his new firm. "I'm in court a lot. … It's a great firm. It's growing fast. We have a growing office in Indianapolis and one in Minneapolis, all of it creating a lot of litigation that seems to go along with any type of business, on occasion. I've been fortunate to step in at the right time and take over that book of litigation they have."

McCaulley said it was always his plan to move west, regardless of the firm he called home. He hasn't made that move to San Jose yet. McCaulley is still working out of the firm's West Loop office in Chicago, preparing to take the California bar exam next year.

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