Raleigh, North Carolina. (Photo: Shutterstock.com)

Barnes & Thornburg has opened new offices in North Carolina, Michigan and Utah with the acquisition of a nine-partner life sciences patent team from IP boutique Brinks Gilson Lione.

By adding the group, consisting of 17 professionals, the Indianapolis-based firm is fulfilling a key strategic goal of launching an office in Raleigh to serve North Carolina's Research Triangle. It's also opening doors in Ann Arbor and Salt Lake City.

The group is led by Allen Baum, an IP attorney who has been based in Raleigh-Durham for more than 20 years, and William R. Boudreaux, an IP attorney in Ann Arbor. A number of the group members have advanced degrees in organic chemistry, molecular biology, chemistry and biotechnology.

"This really expands and deepens our national life sciences practice," said Barnes & Thornburg managing partner Robert T. Grand. "These guys are bringing decades of experience."

Joining Baum and Boudreaux are seven other partners, one associate, two patent agents, an IP technical analyst, and four paralegals. The group officially started at the firm Nov. 23 and began their second week in the office Monday.

Baum—whose Raleigh-based team also includes attorneys Bashir Ali, Amy Fix, Aisha Hasan and Mark Jenkins—said the group was looking to move to a national full-service firm in response to client needs and consolidation in the legal marketplace.

"Companies are looking to get as much of their needs for legal services satisfied from a smaller number of firms," he explained. "The more practice areas you can serve a client in, the broader that relationship can be."

Several former colleagues had moved to Barnes & Thornburg in recent years, and they helped start the conversation. The firm's recent growth, including moves into Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, Columbus and Minneapolis in the last decade, proved appealing.

"One of the things that was impressive about Barnes is that they're now entrenched in the Am Law 100 and they've had a lot of growth over past 10 years," Baum said. "They had a well-oiled machine in place for making this happen."

Baum specifically pointed to what he and his colleagues had learned about the firm's on-boarding program.

"They're able to bring a lot of lateral partners in and hold on to them," he said. "That was very important to us. You want to go to a new place and stay for a long time."

The firm is looking to grow Baum's Raleigh office into a full-service location for the firm, and Grand said that he would be looking to spend time recruiting other attorneys in the region.

The Ann Arbor office is Barnes & Thornburg's third in Michigan, following Detroit, which opened earlier this year, and Grand Rapids, where the firm has had a presence for 15 years. In addition to Boudreaux, a former in-house counsel at major pharmaceutical companies, it is home to partner Joshua Ney, a Ph.D in organic chemistry.

The other new partners are Eric Babych and Ryan Marshall, who will work from Salt Lake City, and Heidi Dare, who joins Barnes & Thornburg's Chicago office.

Before their arrival, the firm's national life science practice was home to 35 attorneys, patent agents and legal professionals. But just as important as the existing bench strength was the orientation of the practice, according to Baum.

"Barnes made the strategic decision to focus on innovators in the pharma-tech space: the brand companies not the generic companies," he said. "That's a great thing in terms of the innovators that we already represent. This brand/generic dynamic doesn't exist at Barnes, they've chosen the innovators' side. It opens up additional doors."

A representative for Brinks Gilson did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.

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