When Brobeck Phleger & Harrison’s former chairman Tower Snow took a team of 17 mostly securities litigation partners to London giant Clifford Chance (CC) in May, the decline of the San Francisco firm, having lost such a high-profile team in a classic counter-cyclical practice, was swiftly predicted.
When New York’s Dewey Ballantine took 11 IP partners last week, also from Brobecks’ contentious practice, things appeared even bleaker for a firm clearly struggling with the two-year slump in the US technology market.
