WSGR sign Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati

Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati has brought back corporate and securities partner Richard Blake from its Silicon Valley rival Gunderson Dettmer Stough Villeneuve Franklin & Hachigian, as the firm gears up for another wave of market debuts among Silicon Valley companies.

After six years at Gunderson Dettmer, Blake returned to Wilson Sonsini's Palo Alto office on Monday. Blake, who previously practiced at Wilson Sonsini from 2000 to 2013, will continue to work on corporate matters, focusing on public company representation, corporate governance and public offerings.

Blake said in addition to allowing him to reunite with former colleagues, Wilson Sonsini offers a broader platform on which he can continue to serve his clients even after they have gone from private to public. Those clients have increasing needs for legal services after an IPO, he said, such as public reporting, mergers and acquisitions, and compliance and regulatory matters, as well as ongoing litigation.

“[Wilson Sonsini] just has the scale and experience that allows public companies to be able to work with them and continue to evolve in their needs and grow in scale.”

IPO investments surged in the first half of 2019. Blake said he expects more companies to go public in the second half, and that IPO activity will remain active into 2020.

“I don't see much slowing down,” Blake said. “There is a lot of appetite among public investors for tech companies who are going public, [and] there is a [large] number of unicorns that have scaled and are in a position to go public.”

Blake has experience preparing private companies for initial public offerings, as well as representing public companies, the firm said in a Monday announcement. During his previous stint at Wilson Sonsini, he was counsel to the New York Stock Exchange's Commission on Corporate Governance, the firm noted. Prior to joining the firm in 2000, Blake clerked for Judge J. Clifford Wallace of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and also clerked for Justice I. Daniel Stewart of the Utah Supreme Court.

“One reason our firm's corporate practice has maintained its leadership position across several areas is because we have been successful at meeting the increasingly sophisticated transactional and governance needs of our clients,” Wilson Sonsini managing partner Doug Clark said in a statement. “Over the course of his career, Richard has built a broad corporate practice that includes complex transactional and governance matters, and we know his expertise will significantly contribute to the work we do for clients, particularly public and private companies.”

Riding on its startup clients' growth, Wilson Sonsini saw its gross revenue grow by 7.5% to $857 million last year. The 764-lawyer firm has hired back several partners in recent months, including partner Brian McDaniel who returned to Wilson Sonsini after more than 11 years in Goodwin Procter's Hong Kong office; and James Jensen, who was the leader of Perkins Coie's China emerging companies practice, and practiced at Wilson Sonsini from 1999 to 2005 before leaving for an in-house role at VantagePoint Capital Partners.

But earlier in the year, partner Denny Kwon, who spent the past decade advising tech deals at Wilson Sonsini, left to join Covington & Burling.

Gunderson Dettmer did not respond to a request for comment on Blake's departure.

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