Boston-based Ropes & Gray plans to spin off about 100 lawyers and staff over the next couple of months in a major restructuring aimed at creating a new patent prosecution practice firm. Joseph Giuliano, co-head of Ropes & Gray’s IP rights management practice in New York, will head the as-yet-unnamed firm.President Donald Trump announced 26 additions to the White House Counsel team, with 15 attorneys coming from large law firms. Most of the lawyers came from Jones Day and Kirkland & Ellis, four from each firm.The House is poised to pass three bills this week championed by industry that may tilt the civil litigation process in favor of business in thousands of cases each year.

 

Law firm business

Blank Rome hit the gas in 2016, adding more than 100 lawyers from Dickstein Shapiro and luring lateral hires from several competitors. It posted a 22.5 percent gain in gross revenue, to $422.5 million, and expanded profits per equity partner by 2.2 percent, to $910,000. A Holland & Knight partner advised the seller in the $87 million sale of One Financial Plaza, a 28-story Class A office tower in downtown Fort Lauderdale, in the city’s first major office deal of the year.

A guide to the Washington, D.C., law firms who will be showing their clients through the “bog” of the Trump Administration. Greenberg Traurig posted gross revenue growth of 4.2 percent, to $1.37 billion, in 2016, while profits per equity partner grew 4.7 percent to $1.5 million. But after chugging ahead in another steady year, the soon-to-be half-century-old firm plans to focus on efficiency and profitability. Morgan Lewis & Bockius said it launched a new remote policy that lets associates work from home for as much as two days per week starting May 1.

Legal Market

Fellow plaintiffs lawyers let Boston attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan have it last summer over her now-rejected $84 million settlement with Uber Technologies Inc. Now Liss-Riordan is dishing out the criticism, as she tries to shoot down a separate, much-smaller, deal the company made to fend off claims under California’s so-called “bounty hunter” law. As other California attorneys enter the fray, the tone has gotten nasty.

Lateral and Moves

Morrison & Foerster hired another ex-federal government attorney with national security expertise, for its new global risk and crisis management practice. New Jersey-headquartered firm Scarinci Hollenbeck said it hired three lawyers for its New York office. They include two former Baker & Hostetler intellectual property lawyers, David Einhorn as chairman of the firm’s technology practice and Eugene Lieberstein, as of counsel. Richard Klar, who was running his own Long Island-based law office, will also be of counsel, the firm said.

Technology

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara’s first dozen tweets on his new personal twitter account, @PreetBharara, mixed humor with serious subjects. As Trump cracks down on immigration, asylum seekers have found a new use for the automated app DoNotPay, originally developed by a Stanford student to help people get out of parking tickets. But the app can’t replace expert advice, warns an official from the American Immigration Lawyers Association.