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Dewey Nabs Affymetrix In-House Team
The Recorder
May 28, 2008
After some setbacks to its Silicon Valley presence, New York's Dewey & LeBoeuf has snatched a team of in-house lawyers from global biotech company Affymetrix.
The firm and Affymetrix announced Tuesday that Barbara Caulfield, formerly a federal judge for the Northern District of California and a top litigator with both Latham & Watkins and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, will head Dewey's Silicon Valley office and will co-chair the firm's intellectual property practice.
And she's bringing friends.
Caulfield, who has been general counsel for Santa Clara, Calif.-based Affymetrix since she left Orrick in 2001, will be bringing colleagues Michael Malecek and Peter Root with her as partners and Dr. Stephen Holmes as counsel, the firm said. Most will start on Friday, with Caulfield following on June 13.
Dewey approached Caulfield to reinvigorate its presence in the Valley, said firm Chairman Steven Davis.
"It's a very small universe of people that fit [her] profile," he said. A partner in the firm had appeared before her years ago when she was a judge, Davis said, and had loosely followed her career arc since.
"The firm made a strategic decision earlier this year to really ramp up in Silicon Valley, and this partner said, 'What about approaching Barbara Caulfield?'" Davis said.
"We just got a great call with a great offer and you've got to consider those," Caulfield said.
At Affymetrix, Caulfield had implemented an unconventional strategy, to cut outside counsel costs by creating an in-house unit to handle some litigation.
That unit had four members, including the three attorneys joining the firm with Caulfield. The fourth attorney is considering accepting an offer to join Dewey as counsel, Malecek said.
The unit had been led by Malecek. Caulfield said she'd previously worked with Malecek at Latham, and with Root and Holmes at Orrick.
Hiring Caulfield is one of the first major moves for Dewey in Silicon Valley since it lost its office managing partner there last year.
While Dewey's Web site lists four partners and four associates in the Silicon Valley office, only one partner and three associates are exclusive to that office. In the past, the office had as many as 25 lawyers.
Davis, who had been with the legacy LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae firm, said the legacy Dewey Ballantine firm started its Silicon Valley office with a team of Brobeck lawyers who left the Dewey Ballantine firm a couple of years ago.
"Dewey was left basically with a much-reduced presence in Silicon Valley and then, when we did the merger to create Dewey & LeBoeuf, we took a fresh look at the entire network of U.S. offices. What we concluded was that one office that really should be a major focus is Silicon Valley," he said.
Affymetrix is currently searching for a replacement general counsel, but a spokesman for the company said the work previously managed by its litigation team will be outsourced -- to the team joining Dewey.
