2004: A Year of Musical Chairs for IP Law Bigshots

There's a very good roundup of the major changes in the landscape of the big-time IP (read: pretty much patents) practice, including the evaporation of pillars such as Pennie & Edmonds and Fish & Neave, in this article from IP Law & Business. This sentence just about says it all:

In January, just five days after Barry Shelton's firm, Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich merged to become part of 2,700 lawyer megafirm DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary, the patent litigator left to open Fish & Richardson's two-lawyer Austin office.

You really have to respect reports who can keep that sort of thing straight. This one is Tamara Loomis, who seems to know the territory well.

2,7000 lawyers in a firm called DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary. As a 1988 law school graduate, I'll be among the last to remember an era when such a concept -- an awful, clunky, soul-less name featuring meaningless initials and the names of two very good (but not necessarily great) American law firms now featuring a website with spellings like "organisation" and constructions such as, "The global organisation, DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary, does not itself provide (directly or indirectly) any legal or other client services. These services are provided solely by such of its members as are described as Practising Entities in the Organisational Statement."

Wow. Lawyers outsourcing our very souls to Euroweenies!