LTL Attorneys has hired Vincent Pollmeier, a former rocket scientist at NASA who spent roughly 14 years at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, as a partner in Los Angeles.

Pollmeier joins LTL, formerly known as Lee Tran & Liang, from Karish & Bjorgum, an intellectual property boutique in Pasadena, California, he joined nearly three years ago after leaving Quinn Emanuel.

“For me personally, [Quinn Emanuel] had become larger and bigger than I ideally was looking for, so I wanted someplace smaller and went to Karish & Bjorgum,” Pollmeier said. “Karish & Bjorgum is a great firm, but I realized that after being there for a couple of years that I need someplace more focused on litigation.”

Pollmeier said he found LTL to be a “good fit” because of the firm's size and focus on complex litigation. According to LTL's website, the minority-owned firm has 18 lawyers working on commercial litigation, employment defense and intellectual property matters. (In October, Boies Schiller Flexner hired LTL co-founder K. Luan Tran as a partner in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley.)

“[LTL] focuses on a broad range of business litigation,” said Pollmeier, adding that he was drawn to the firm's emphasis in using the latest technology to make legal services more efficient. “As you can tell from my resume, one thing I don't like to do is do the same thing over and over again.”

Vincent Pollmeier

Before shifting career gears into the legal world, Pollmeier was an aerospace engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena for nearly a dozen years.

Despite the prominent position as a principal system engineer at the world-renowned facility, Pollmeier said he always harbored dreams of becoming a lawyer.

“By the mid-90s, I was managing a [research and development] program for the space network, and I was finding myself having to deal with a lot of IP, contracting and other issues,” he explained. “So I became interested in a lot of legal issues.”

In 1996, while still working full time at NASA, Pollmeier started attending Loyola Law School in Los Angles in the evenings. On earning his law degree, Pollmeier began working as an associate at Knobbe, Martens, Olson & Bear. After about two years, he left the IP-focused firm to join Quinn Emanuel, where he was named the latter's chief technology counsel in 2009.

“Litigation isn't rocket science, it's more difficult than that,” Pollmeier said.

As a lawyer, Pollmeier has focused his practice on representing both plaintiffs and defendants in disputes involving a myriad of technological sectors, such as aerospace, communications, computers and electronics. He has handled breach of contract, government investigations, insurance, patent infringement and white-collar defense matters.

“Vincent's experience with patent and technology litigation will be a boon to our [IP] practice and to our technology clients. His deep knowledge of technical materials and systems, gained via his education and experiences at NASA, allows him to explain these complex concepts clearly to courts and juries,” said a statement from LTL Attorneys managing partner David Ammons, who joined the firm in 2016. “Vincent's addition, along with a steady influx of associates in recent months, supplements our existing team of talented attorneys and allows us to continue to advance our results-driven, client-first mission.”