(Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM)

Manatt, Phelps & Phillips has picked up a pair of veteran intellectual property litigators from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan in California in an expansion of the firm's technology and IP litigation practice.

Partner Amar Thakur, who represents telecommunications, software, medical device and semiconductor companies in IP disputes, will work out of Manatt's San Francisco and Orange County offices. Patent litigator Bruce Zisser, who was of counsel at Quinn, is joining in Los Angeles. The pair started as partners at Manatt on Wednesday.

In a phone interview Tuesday, Thakur, who was a partner at Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton and Foley & Lardner prior to joining Quinn as a partner in 2012, said that Manatt's "comprehensive approach" to looking at technology clients' legal and business needs is what attracted him to the firm.

"I think I bring an excitement and youthful energy to a platform that I think is about to explode," he said.

Thakur's litigation highlights at Quinn included a $147.2 million plaintiff-side jury verdict for software client Mformation Technologies in 2012 in a patent dispute with BlackBerry device maker Research in Motion Ltd. over a remote management system for wireless devices. On the defense side, Thakur also scored a no-infringement jury verdict for clients Verizon Wireless and Novatel Wireless in 2017.

Thakur said that at Manatt he plans to continue to work with clients to put together creative alternative fee arrangements when appropriate, something he said he's been doing since the early 2000s. He said his prior arrangements have run the gamut from full-contingency plaintiff-side work, to defense assignments handled on a fees-by-stage or fees-by-motion basis.

But he added that increasingly alternative fees in the intellectual property space have meant the involvement of litigation funders, something he said there's "no shame" in admitting.

"I think litigation funding is increasingly becoming a way of life in the intellectual property practice," he said.

Both Thakur and Zisser hold engineering degrees, with Zisser also having 10 years' experience as an electrical engineer, including five-plus years working on communication systems in the U.S. Air Force.

In an email statement, Quinn Emanuel's founding partner John Quinn said: "We wish them well."

Their arrival at Manatt follows a string of Los Angeles additions at the firm, including transactional partner Paul Carr-Rollitt and litigation partner Charles Weir from McDermott Will & Emery, and consumer financial services litigation partner Scott Pearson from Ballard Spahr. The firm also added Hogan Lovells regulatory partner Yarmela Pavlovic, who focuses on representing digital healthcare companies, in San Francisco in November.