January 31, 2000

THE CALIFORNIA LAW BUSINESS REVIEW

ORANGE COUNTY – Patent and intellectual property litigators Edward F. O’Connor and Jan P. Weir have joined Newport Beach’s Stradling Yocca Carlson & Rauth as partners.

O’Connor and Weir were previously senior patent litigators with Minneapolis-based Oppenheimer Wolff & Donnelly. O’Connor practiced out of the Orange County office and Weir, out of Los Angeles.

“Stradling Yocca is increasingly being referred to as the Wilson Sonsini of the south,” says Robert J. Kane, partner in charge of the litigation and labor and employment departments. “We’re very excited about the addition of O’Connor and Weir.”

O’Connor, who specializes in patent and IP litigation, has 30 years of experience. Weir, also a patent and IP litigator, also specializes in molecular and biochemistry law. Their clients include Nike, Winn Oil Co., Scholle Corp., Yasuda Fire & Marine Casualty and Fender Musical Instruments.

Both lawyers have worked together since 1989 at Los Angeles-based Poms, Smith Lande & Rose, which was acquired by Oppenheimer in 1997. Their move to Stradling was brokered by legal recruiter Bill Nason of Southern California-based Watanabe & Nason.

Stradling Yocca now has 105 attorneys specializing in high technology and has satellite offices in San Francisco and Santa Barbara.

David Perry, managing partner of Oppenheimer’s Los Angeles and Orange County offices, says he wishes both lawyers well. “Ed O’Connor is a first rate intellectual property lawyer and he had a unique opportunity to build a practice with a good firm with an emerging company business, and he took it.”

Perry, a corporate lawyer, took his leadership role only recently. He replaces Christopher Darrow as managing partner of Oppenheimer’s 29-attorney Los Angeles office and its 23-lawyer Newport Beach office. Darrow has returned full time to his IP practice.

Perry says he plans to build up the corporate practice in the L.A. office. The L.A. office has only one corporate attorney, partner Mark Levinson, while the Newport Beach office has 15 attorneys in the corporate and financial transactions group.

“Our objective in Los Angeles is to continue to emphasize our long-standing intellectual property prosecution and litigation practice areas while building a corporate practice which we believe will enhance our focus on emerging and technology companies,” Perry says.