Robert Allen of Pierce Bainbridge Beck Price & Hecht. Courtesy photo.

Fast-growing litigation boutique Pierce Bainbridge Beck Price & Hecht has continued its hiring spree, bringing on a Los Angeles intellectual property litigator from McKool Smith.

Robert Allen started at Pierce Bainbridge's Los Angeles office at the Wells Fargo Center South Tower Monday. He specializes in copyright-related disputes, particularly in the entertainment and new media sectors.

Allen, who had been with McKool Smith since 2015, said he was drawn to Pierce Bainbridge by its copyright practice. “I think it was time to move to a sort of a firm that was on more of the cutting edge of the area that I practice,” he said.

Pierce Bainbridge was launched in January 2017 by two Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan alumni, John Pierce and David Sergenian. Sergenian has since departed to start his own firm.

Since its launch, Pierce Bainbridge has been growing aggressively on both coasts. To kick off 2019, the Los Angeles-based firm announced that it opened a new office in Boston and hired Thomas Frongillo from Fish & Richardson to co-chair its white-collar practice there. Pierce Bainbridge also recently added a number of new partners in its New York office, which first opened late last spring.

“It is a great opportunity to grow with a firm that is in growth mode,” Allen said. “Pierce Bainbridge offers the opportunity for me to utilize additional abilities and talents of mine in that process of growth.”

Before joining McKool Smith, Allen headed his own law firm in Manhattan Beach, which focused on entertainment-related IP disputes. Before that, he briefly worked as an of counsel at Los Angeles boutique Gradstein & Marzano. For more than a decade before that, he served as the senior vice president and head of business and legal affairs at Universal Music Publishing Group.

“Each of these experiences, I think, [was] different, but made me overall a better attorney,” Allen added.

In a statement, McKool Smith said: “It's a reality of the legal business that a firm of our scale and stature will see people come and go from time to time. We wish Robert the best in his new venture.”

McKool Smith has more than 100 patent litigators and IP lawyers, it said.

The Dallas-based firm recently saw several losses in California, as IP litigator Lawrence Hadley left in November to join Glaser Weil Fink Howard Avchen & Shapiro, and a 13-attorney group, led by Courtland Reichman and Sarah Jorgensen, spun off in October to open a new litigation boutique, Reichman Jorgensen.

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