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By Gina Passarella
The Legal Intelligencer
03-27-2007

Atlanta-based labor and employment firm Fisher & Phillips is moving into the Philadelphia area with the help of six attorneys from Saul Ewing.

The firm opened an Exton, Pa., office Monday with three partners, two of counsel and one associate from Saul Ewing.

Making the move are partners Christopher P. Stief, David W. Erb and Michael R. Greco. Of counsel Susan M. Guerette and Risa B. Boerner, and associate Heather Zalar Steele will join them next week.

Stief, Erb and Greco have a national practice that focuses on litigating employee defection and recruitment matters involving noncompete agreements and trade secrets.

Aside from their litigation practice, the group counsels clients on employee defection and recruitment matters involving statutory issues under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Espionage Act and various state trade secrets and unfair competition statutes.

Fisher & Phillips, which only represents management in labor and employment matters, has 18 offices and 190 attorneys throughout the country.

Stief will be the regional managing partner of the new office, which will soon be housed in Radnor, Pa. The firm is moving out of its temporary space in Exton soon.

"The addition of some of the top attorneys practicing in the growing area of noncompetition and protection of trade secrets strengthens both our offerings to our clients and our presence in the Northeast," Fisher & Phillips Chairman Roger Quillen said in a statement. "We have deliberately, but carefully, sought attorneys who focus their practice on protecting companies' intellectual assets, a growing area of need for our clients."

Stief said his group had started looking for a new firm when conflicts began to come up at Saul Ewing. He said it looked like those conflicts would just become more prevalent as time went on.

The group would represent one brokerage firm, for example, and have to be adverse to all others, he said. That would often create conflicts, Stief said, for partners in other practice areas who wanted to do work for Stief's clients' competition.

Saul Ewing managing partner David S. Antzis said that while he would have had the group stay on as long as they wanted, their practice was not quite in line with the firm's strategy to gain larger clients.

He said the group's primary client base was made up of regional brokerage firms that were up against large brokerage houses. Antzis said Saul Ewing is looking to represent the larger firms, not the regional ones.

When Stief and Greco came to Saul Ewing about five years ago, the goal was to expand their practice to represent companies in a variety of industries, such as pharmaceutical companies, he said.

"We were hoping that they could transition their practice ... but they have found that their greatest source of business was from regional brokerage firms," Antzis said.

Stief said his practice has a variety of clients, but the largest portion is made up of financial services companies.

"Our practice and other practices in the firm were inhibiting each other [at times]," he said.

In looking for new firms, Stief said he felt the group's national practice would fit well with Fisher & Phillips' national reach. He said he cold-called Quillen and asked whether the firm would be interested in bringing them on board. It was good timing, Stief said, because Fisher & Phillips had recently decided that it wanted to bolster its employee defection practice and had wanted to move into Philadelphia ever since opening a North Jersey office a few years ago.

While there will be six attorneys to start, Greco said he wants to immediately grow to about 10 to 12 attorneys. The office will be focused solely on employee defection and recruitment work at first, but Stief said he wants to bring in more general labor and employment practitioners.

Bob Nourian of Coleman Nourian said that while labor and employment law is as busy as it ever was, a growing aspect of the practice is employee defection and recruitment work. As the economy moves more toward service-based industries, the war for talent becomes all the more prevalent, he said.

"That piece has possibly more upward momentum than general labor and employment defense," Nourian said.

Fisher & Phillips is the second Atlanta-based labor and employment firm to open up in Philadelphia this year. Ogletree Deakins Nash Smoak & Stewart opened Philadelphia and Pittsburgh offices in January.

Ogletree Deakins acquired six-attorney Polito & Smock in the Steel City just a day after announcing that it would acquire four-attorney Simon Moran in Philadelphia.

Littler Mendelson also opened up an office in Philadelphia in 2001.

Nourian said it is probably coincidental that two labor and employment firms moved into the city so close in time. He said it is a natural growth model for the "super-sized boutique" to open small offices in several cities. Because those types of boutiques have centralized models, it is easy to leverage resources and create a new office with just a few attorneys, he said.

The six new attorneys at Fisher & Phillips, with the exception of Erb, will be housed in the firm's soon-to-be Radnor office. While at Saul Ewing, Stief, Greco and Boerner worked out of both the Philadelphia and Chesterbrook, Pa., offices; Guerette worked out of the Chesterbrook office; Steele worked out of the Philadelphia and Harrisburg offices and Erb worked out of the Baltimore office.

At Fisher & Phillips, Erb will work with the group remotely from Maryland.