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Who will follow Donald Keller Jr. et al. to Orrick--and why?

I'm betting we haven't heard the last of this. And until it all shakes out, I'm guessing there will be some teeth ground over, say, breakfast if and when horse-changer Donald Keller Jr. and some of his former colleagues at Heller Ehrman's Venture Law Group catch sight of each other over flapjacks. (Aside: Why flapjacks? Well, if you want to fund a start-up here in Silicon Valley, you'll end up at Buck's restaurant at some point.)

Now that Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe  has upped its Heller body count to nine partner attorneys (see Marie-Anne Hogarth's piece in The Recorder), it looks like war. Make that war, ongoing: As Hogarth reports and many 'round here know, Orrick and once-independent VLG used to share clients and talked merger until -- oops! -- VLG's 60 attorneys joined Heller in September 2003.

Orrick's thrilled. Heller's saying nothing, but I can't find a trace of these players on the Heller Web site. The loss of Keller's expertise and connections -- Oracle, eHarmony, Determine Systems, Fabric7 are among his wins in 20 years in the valley -- has to sting.

And Keller's got good company -- the list as a whole is pauseworthy. In addition to Keller, Orrick in the past two weeks has nabbed Glen Van Ligten, John Bautista, David Lee, Michael Morrissey, Thomas Tobiason, Mark Windfeld-Hansen and Mitchell Zuklie.  Hogarth notes that Edmund Ruffin Jr. also made the switch in Washington, D.C. Hmmm -- to Rees Morrison's point, I wonder how VLG's group co-chair and shareholder Mark Weeks and his colleagues would answer this survey now. ...

Perhaps you know the answer. Here's my question for you: What didn't work in the past eighteen months that led these folks to jump ship? What's wrong at Heller? What's right at Orrick? Who's next?

I welcome your comments.

Posted by Jennifer Moline on March 8, 2005 at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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