July 11, 2007
THE DAILY JOURNAL
By William-Arthur Haynes
SAN FRANCISCO – Energy finance partners James R. Cowan and Arthur T. Kolios, both formerly of Thelen Reid Brown Raysman & Steiner, and corporate and securities partner Harold R. DeGraff, most recently of Greenberg Traurig, have joined Seattle-based Perkins Coie.
Cowan, 43, and Kolios, 41, who joined the firm Tuesday, have worked closely at Thelen for the past five years to develop the project finance practice they bring to Perkins Coie’s San Francisco office.
Cowan said the 600-attorney firm presented geographic and practice-area capabilities that would benefit their service to housing developer Actus Lend Lease, a Nashville-based company that has built numerous energy-efficient housing communities for institutional owners nationwide, including all four branches of the United States military.
Cowan will work in the firm’s 20-attorney San Francisco office. Kolios will practice in San Francisco until August, when he’ll relocate permanently to the firm’s Seattle headquarters.
John S. Rossiter, San Francisco managing partner, said the duo’s practice melded with the firm’s energy and finance groups and other work done out of Seattle and Chicago.
Legal recruiter Watanabe Nason Schwartz & Lippman engineered the move for Cowan and Kolios.
DeGraff, 42, joined the business practice in Menlo Park on July 3.
His practice includes the formation and financing of start-ups, counseling public companies on mergers and acquisitions and public and private financing and representing private equity funds in recapitalizations, portfolio investments and other strategic transactions.
DeGraff brings with him such clients as prepaid-card provider AccountNow, collaboration software developers Joyent and Muse Research, developers of music composition and audio recording technologies.
His resume includes a spell with Latham & Watkins sandwiched between two stints at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.
DeGraff’s second tenure at Wilson Sonsini ended in 2003 when he went in-house to serve as associate general counsel of Intuit Inc., the Mountain View-based developers of popular business and finance software such as QuickBooks, Quicken and TurboTax. Greenberg Traurig recruited him in 2004 to help launch the firm’s East Palo Alto office.
“My motivation was to join a group with a focus on emerging-growth companies, which Perkins has,” DeGraff said. “As a firm, Perkins has a strong focus on emerging companies, not only here but in Seattle and some of the other markets in which they’re very strong.”
The “positive experience at Greenberg” notwithstanding, DeGraff said three colleagues from his most recent firm – partners David I. Frazee, Stefan V. Clulow and Lior Zorea, all of whom joined Perkins Coie’s Menlo Park office earlier this year – were an equally enticing factor.
Perkins Coie is focused on a growth trajectory across all its California offices, emphasizing commercial litigation and business niches, including start-up representation and Kolios and Cowan’s energy finance work, Rossiter said.
On May 1, complex commercial litigator Donald J. Kula joined Perkins Coie’s Los Angeles office from Bingham McCutchen, coinciding with Bingham’s announcement of the Alschuler Grossman acquisition.
Kula said his decision to leave Bingham was unrelated to the merger.
Perkins Coie would not confirm Tuesday earlier reports that a three-partner antitrust litigation group was slated to join the San Francisco office from Bingham McCutchen. Sources close to the deal said the parties were navigating a conflict, but the sources didn’t know the details.