June 16, 2008
THE NATIONAL JOURNAL
Lock up your litigators: Howrey’s Northern California branch is on the hunt for lateral hires.
“We plan to increase our size by 50 percent to 70 percent in the next three to four years,” said Henry Bunsow, the Northern California managing partner for Howrey. “I think the market is ready for that and Howrey is now a well recognized name in Northern California,” he said.
The Washington-based firm currently has 67 lawyers divided between its San Francisco and East Palo Alto branches.
Howrey got into the San Francisco Bay Area via the back door, gaining a Silicon Valley office in East Palo Alto in a 2000 merger with Arnold White & Durkee.
That gave it an intellectual property footprint in Northern California at a time when the merger created the largest intellectual property practice in the world, with 230 IP attorneys in a national firm of 440 at the time.
Then, in 2002, Howrey needed space in San Francisco for a Los Angeles team of lawyers to work during a four-month insurance recovery trial in a defective-construction dispute, according to Benjamin Riley, a specialist in complex commercial litigation for Howrey.
The team snatched the entire 36th floor of a financial district building that came fully fitted, but never occupied, from a company that hit hard times in the market downturn, according to Riley. That provided ample working space for the trial, and when Bunsow joined Howrey as regional managing partner, that allowed for the creation of a permanent office in San Francisco.
The two Northern California offices grew quickly to their present size. Last month, Bunsow lured civil trial attorney Paul Alexander away from Heller Ehrman to work in the East Palo Alto office.
Alexander, 61, is expected to help attract commercial trial lawyers over to Howrey.
Howrey currently has 660 lawyers in North America, Europe and Asia.