Peter Spirgel. (Photo: Carmen Natale/ALM)

A group of six partners from Flaster Greenberg, including its chairman of the board and several practice group leaders, have left to start their own law firm.

The seven Flaster lawyers, including the six partners and one associate, announced their new firm, Lex Nova Law LLC, on Thursday. They are joined by three staff from Flaster Greenberg, and two lawyers from other firms.

The group includes Peter Spirgel, who was Flaster Greenberg's chairman of the board until recently, and who served as the firm's managing shareholder for 18 years until he stepped down in 2017. In an interview Thursday evening, he described the new firm as a "high-end corporate boutique."

Other Flaster partners joining Lex Nova are Markley Roderick, a tax corporate and securities lawyer; E. Richard Dressel, who chaired Flaster's bankruptcy practice; Bernard Eizen, a tax, trust and estates lawyer; Darren Goldstein, who chaired Flaster's commercial litigation practice; and William Skinner, a corporate lawyer who was Flaster's loss prevention partner.

The new firm will represent businesses and entrepreneurs in complex tax, corporate, securities, bankruptcy and commercial litigation matters, and mergers and acquisitions. Many of its lawyers are based in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, Spirgel said, and it will also have offices in New York City and Washington, D.C.

Spirgel said the group was compelled by the opportunity to work together in a smaller setting.

"The strategic direction of Flaster has been to grow geographically and add specialties that we just didn't see as helping our particular practice," Spirgel said. Still, he said the group has no "ill will" with the firm he led for nearly two decades.

Flaster Greenberg name partner Steve Greenberg said in an interview Thursday evening that Flaster Greenberg has known about the group's departure for a few months, and that Spirgel stepped down as chairman of the board as soon as he announced his plans to leave. He said the firm will continue its strategy for growth. That includes a group of IP lawyers joining the firm, he said, the details of which will be announced soon.

"This happens every day in the legal industry, especially in the legal industry, because we don't have any noncompete covenants," Greenberg said, referring to the group departure. "They were with our firm for a very long time, most of them, and they made very valuable contributions to our firm, most of them, but we're looking forward and moving ahead."

Greenberg also noted that Flaster Greenberg recently restructured its board "to be more inclusive" and took steps to pass leadership responsibilities to younger lawyers.

"As a first-generational firm, we've been working on transitioning the leadership of the firm to the next generation of lawyers," he said.

Spirgel said Lex Nova will be adding more lawyers in the coming weeks, and will likely have a lawyer head count of 15 to 20 in the near future. He declined to answer how large the firm will be in terms of revenue, but he said the partners have not seen any resistance from their clients to moving over to the new firm.

In creating the new firm, he said, one thing the Lex Nova lawyers look forward to doing differently is increasing the use of technology. He said Flaster Greenberg had not totally migrated to the cloud simply due to the amount of legacy hardware it had, as an established firm. He said Lex Nova is also aiming to be mostly paperless.

"One advantage of starting fresh is all our technology is going to be brand new and state-of-the-art," Spirgel said.

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