Cozen O'Connor has added a 14-lawyer group from Drinker Biddle & Reath, the firm announced Thursday.

The commercial litigation team, led by partners Michael Miller, Gregory Star and Stephen Harris, will work out of Cozen O'Connor's Philadelphia office. They follow a string of lateral hires in 2017 that allowed Cozen O'Connor to increase revenue by more than 10 percent from 2016.

The lateral hires will also allow Cozen O'Connor to launch two new practice groups, led by Miller and Star. They will be chair and vice-chair, respectively, of new life insurance and annuities practice groups, and they will co-chair a newly created software industry team.

Also part of the life insurance and annuities practice are incoming partners Joseph Kelleher, Jennifer Smith and Susan Stauss; counsel Nicole Calabro, Jessica Goebeler and Lisa Stern; and associates Alex Hayden, Sarah Kalman, Daniel Thiel and Laura Zulick.

In addition, the firm said, Charles Vinicombe is now of counsel at Cozen O'Connor, after retiring from Drinker Biddle in January.

Cozen O'Connor CEO Michael Heller said he got connected with the group through a recruiter and immediately saw them as a good fit strategically and culturally. Their book of business is “very substantial,” he said, declining to elaborate further. As for their practice expertise, he said the lawyers have been “creating law on these types of matters.”

“They are entrepreneurial, passionate about what they do [and] have created a national brand as the absolute, undeniable leaders in this space,” Heller said. “One critical element of our strategic plan is to continue to bring in niche practices that, on a national basis, it is clear that they are the leaders in the industry that they serve.”

“Their impressive track records as litigators in the financial sector and software industry will further enhance and solidify our standing as the go-to firm for sophisticated clients with complicated business litigation,” Cozen O'Connor CEO Michael Heller said of the hires in a statement. “What they provide for our financial services and insurance industry clients is a tremendous asset—they are creating law on these types of matters.”

According to Drinker Biddle chairman Andrew Kassner, the move was expected.

“Their practices no longer aligned with our insurance and financial services sector strategy and plan and, in fact, increasingly caused numerous conflicts with our financial services company clients. We are glad that Mike and his colleagues were able to find a solution by joining Cozen O'Connor,” Kassner said in a statement Thursday. “Their departure does not affect Drinker Biddle's strategic advance of our premier national insurance regulatory, corporate and litigation practices.”

Miller acknowledged that his group started looking for a new firm for that reason.

“We started looking a while ago because we had some continuing conflict of interest issues that were getting increasingly difficult to solve,” he said. “Most of the conflicts issues resolved on their own, but by then we had met Michael Heller.”

They chose Cozen O'Connor, Miller said, because the firm offered infrastructure that would allow the group to continue serving clients in major, complex litigation, but also offered rate flexibility to clients with small to medium-scale commercial litigation matters, including life insurance claims cases.

The group's practice includes representing software companies in complex commercial litigation and representing life insurance companies in stranger-originated life insurance cases—”where investors buy large life insurance policies on total strangers and then wait for them to die so the investors can collect on their bets,” Miller said. They also handle traditional life insurance claims cases and structured settlement issues and litigation.

Software and life insurance don't necessarily go hand-in-hand, Miller said, but they both fall under the umbrella of commercial litigation, and happen to be the industries in which he and his colleagues have the most experience.

Cozen O'Connor has been bulking up various targeted practice areas and niche services, including labor and employment and institutional response to sexual misconduct. The latter was a newly formed practice group last year when Cozen O'Connor recruited two partners from Pepper Hamilton. The firm has since added to that group, including the acquisition of a campus safety consulting firm.

The Drinker Biddle additions don't represent the largest group Cozen O'Connor has taken from a fellow Pennsylvania-based firm recently. Beginning last spring, the firm recruited more than 30 lawyers from multiple offices of Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, including a number of labor and employment lawyers. With that group, Cozen O'Connor was able to establish a foothold in Pittsburgh.