Polsinelli, an Am Law 100 firm on a growth spurt in recent years, is hiring a group of five intellectual property litigators from McDermott Will & Emery in Silicon Valley as it seeks to continue its westward expansion.

McDermott partners Fabio Marino, Barrington Dyer and Nitin Gambhir are joining Polsinelli in Palo Alto along with associates Teri Nguyen and Lucas Dahlin. Dyer, Gambhir and Nguyen will come aboard as partners.

Marino, leader of McDermott's Northern California IP practice, will become vice chair of the IP department at Polsinelli, chair of the firm's IP litigation practice group and managing partner of its Palo Alto office, which opened in the fall of 2016.

The group's move has its roots in Polsinelli's acquisition last year of 44 lawyers from former IP boutique Novak Druce Connolly Bove + Quigg, which included Novak Druce name partners Gregory Novak and Tracy Druce, and gave Polsinelli one of the country's largest IP practices.

Marino had been longtime friends with Novak and Druce and once the duo decamped for Polsinelli, they began discussing their new firm's growth strategy with Marino.

“I really was looking for a firm that was growing,” said Marino, who along with Dyer and Gambhir joined McDermott's Menlo Park office in 2012 from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. “I was also looking for a good fit for both my practice and my team's practice.”

Ultimately, Marino said the deciding factor was Polsinelli's growing IP practice capabilities and the firm's desire to expand its jury trial capabilities in the IP space—a specialty of Marino's group—that led to its decision to join the Kansas City, Missouri-based firm.

“[Polsinelli] is actually increasing the size of the IP practice [at] a time where I think a lot of the other firms are actually decreasing,” said Marino, whose team also handles patent, trademark and IP litigation work for high-tech companies specializing in computer networks and telecommunications systems. “I think the firm is ideally positioned to do that because of their structure and the way they approach the relationship with clients—and they can align themselves with client interests a little bit better than a lot of other firms.”

Marino said that he plans on running Polsinelli's Silicon Valley office as an integrated unit with its nearby outpost in San Francisco, the latter a location the firm opened in late 2014 after recruiting a team from McKenna Long & Aldridge.

In addition, as chair of the IP litigation group, Marino's goal is not simply just to add to Polsinelli's skillset, but also to recruit like-minded laterals across the country and fully build out a high-stakes litigation group at his new firm with a full-service capacity in the IP arena.

“They're an excellent group, really talented thoughtful lawyers who have a tremendous practice nationwide and, in particular, in Northern California,” said Patrick Woolley, the Kansas City-based chair of Polsinelli's IP department.

The addition of Marino's group is part of Polsinelli's ultimate goal of becoming a destination IP practice for both major companies and startups, said Woolley, adding that such a process involves expanding its patent and trade prosecution practices, as well as its Hatch-Waxman Act and IP litigation offerings.

“We have a national platform and we need to continue to add lawyers that add to that platform to make us better,” Woolley said. “The chance to bring in a person of [Marino's] stature and skillset would enhance our overall brand and our reputation as an IP litigation destination practice and, in particular, strengthen our brand in Northern California.”

Polsinelli has grown leaps and bounds within the last 20 years, from a 90-lawyer firm focused on the Kansas City area to a 758-lawyer national practice. The rapid expansion was part of a strategy implemented by longtime firm leader W. Russell Welsh, who earlier this year confirmed his plan to step down in January 2019 and make way for real estate chair F. Chase Simmons.

In a 2013 feature story by The American Lawyer, Welsh, who became leader of the firm in 1998, said that Polsinelli was focused on using its concentration of lawyers in low-overhead markets such as Kansas City and St. Louis to compete for health care work and other price-sensitive matters.

As for McDermott, the departure of Marino and his team are the latest IP lawyers of note to break ranks from the firm in recent years. In March 2015, former Silicon Valley-based partner Yar Chaikovsky, a prominent IP lawyer at the firm, left to join Paul Hastings.

McDermott, which reshuffled its leadership last year, did recruit three IP partners earlier this year in Washington, D.C., from Ropes & Gray.