McDermott Will & Emery offices in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM)

McDermott Will & Emery has entered the Atlanta market, opening an eight-lawyer office focused on merger and acquisitions, intellectual property litigation and cybersecurity law.

M&A partner Frank Layson, who joined from DLA Piper with clients including The Coca-Cola Co. and other Fortune 500 companies, is leading the office for the Am Law 50 firm. Two other M&A partners, Paul Puckett and Sam Snider, joined with Layson from DLA Piper.

McDermott also recruited a four-lawyer IP litigation team from Kasowitz Benson Torres, led by partner Jeffrey Toney, with senior counsel Ralph Gaskins, of counsel Jackie Toney and associate Hala Mourad. Todd McClelland, who has a cybersecurity and privacy practice, joined as a partner from Jones Day.

Layson said the M&A team is working on matters for Coca-Cola and GE spinoff Baker Hughes and hopes to continue doing work for other longtime clients. Because of the pandemic, he said, "Clients are being cautious in their dealmaking activities, but they are still out there looking."

McDermott's partner in charge of strategy, Michael Poulos, helped to recruit the M&A team from DLA Piper, his former firm. Poulos said he'd known Layson at DLA Piper, where Poulos was the firmwide managing partner before joining McDermott in 2018.

Poulos said McDermott had been considering an Atlanta office for over a year and spent months talking to local lawyers before hiring the attorneys from DLA Piper, Kasowitz and Jones Day. Atlanta's depth of legal talent and its growing importance as a U.S. economic center and legal market made it attractive, he said.

"There are some exceptional lawyers in Atlanta whom we knew would integrate fairly easily and completely into our global platform," Poulos said, noting that the city is a fintech hub, has a strong health care market and is the headquarters for a number of Fortune 500 companies.

The Atlanta office. announced Tuesday, is McDermott's 13th U.S. office and its first in the Southeast other than Miami. McDermott, which has 21 offices worldwide, most recently entered Wilmington, Delaware, in 2019 and San Francisco in 2018.

McDermott, headquartered in Chicago, reported $1.1 billion in revenue last year, ranking it at No. 31 by revenue on the American Lawyer's Am Law 100 list. The 1,100 lawyer firm reported profit per equity partner of $2 million and revenue per lawyer of $1.12 million.

Atlanta has become an increasingly competitive legal market. Other Am Law firms have also opened Atlanta offices in the last few years, including Akerman and Shook, Hardy & Bacon and Squire Patton Boggs.

Poulos said he thinks the "McDermott brand" can compete locally, as evidenced by the firm's success in recruiting the DLA Piper, Kasowitz and Jones Day lawyers, and that it can "attract high-profile lawyers with cross-border practices based out of Atlanta."

McDermott officially gained a presence in Atlanta on March 13, after hiring the IP litigation team from Kasowitz—but that was just as the coronavirus pandemic hit, Poulos said.

"The marketplace was scrambling to deal with the pandemic and the uncertainty it brings to our industry," Poulos said. "We did not think it appropriate to announce a new office in the middle of that."

Now, "people are more grounded" than in mid-March, he added, so it seemed a good time.

Currently, McDermott's eight new Atlanta attorneys are working from home, like the rest of the firm, Layson said, but the firm has leased about a half floor of office space at 1180 Peachtree St. N.E. in Midtown, with a targeted occupancy date of June 1.

McDermott has an option for another floor at 1180 Peachtree, he added.

Practices and Plans

Layson, who's spent his 30-year legal career in Atlanta—first at Long Aldridge Norman, then Paul Hastings, Jones Day and DLA Piper—said he and Snider, his longtime law partner from DLA Piper, were at a point where they thought opening a new office for McDermott would be "an interesting challenge."

"We talked about the things we'd enjoyed most about practicing law, and it was almost always related to people—the people we'd worked with and our clients," Layson said. "We thought building an office of people we wanted to work with would be a lot of fun—and that we were at a point in our careers where we had the network and skills to do it."

Layson said McDermott is interested in adding litigation and finance lawyers to the Atlanta office. "We're going to be opportunistic. We're interested in talking to any great lawyer or group," he said, adding that practices that fit with the transactional team's representation of large companies would make the most sense.

Layson and Snider first worked together at Paul Hastings, then Snider joined Layson at DLA Piper after a stint in-house as the head of the M&A legal team at LexisNexis (now owned by Atlanta-based RELX Group), which Layson said became a client.

"The story of my practice is that almost every client I have is someone I used to work with at a law firm," Layson said, including lawyers at General Electric Co., Coca-Cola, The Home Depot and Intercontinental Exchange. Many of his deals have been international, such as a series of acquisitions for Coca-Cola in Africa.

Layson has also known Puckett, the other M&A partner from DLA Piper, for years. They first worked together at Paul Hastings, when Puckett was a young associate and then Puckett moved with Layson to Jones Day, where they worked with McClelland. Last year Puckett rejoined Layson at DLA Piper.

Toney and the other IP lawyers from Kasowitz primarily handle patent litigation for pharmaceutical companies, such as patent infringement cases for Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals.

Representatives for DLA Piper, Kasowitz and Jones Day didn't immediately reply to messages seeking comment.