Karen Boyd thought she’d be handling small pieces of big IP cases when she left Fish & Richardson to start her own firm back in 2008. That didn’t happen.

Instead, Boyd says she and partner Julie Turner, who’d come from Day Casebeer Madrid & Batchelder, stumbled onto another need they could fill: representing some of the many companies that find themselves rounded up and sued en masse for patent infringement by so-called nonpracticing entities.