While much of the world retreated inside their homes in response to the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, Dallas commercial litigation attorney Nicholas Sarokhanian and his wife, Katie, packed up their kids and moved to her hometown near Minneapolis.
Katie Sarokhanian, a vintage designer and dealer with a large social media following, had been approached before by Hollywood production companies about launching a TV show. Facing economic uncertainty brought by the pandemic, the couple decided to give it a try with the Magnolia Network, and they launched The Art of Vintage outside Stillwater, Minnesota.
As the world started returning to normalcy, Nicholas said he and his wife longed to stay in Minnesota. But Nicholas thrives on in-person collaboration, he said, and missed going into an office with colleagues as the only Holland & Knight lawyer in Minnesota.
He decided to make a lateral move and, on Monday, he joined Barnes & Thornburg as an equity partner. He will work in the firm’s Dallas and Minneapolis offices. The move reunites Sarokhanian and Dallas partner Victor Vital. They worked together at Greenberg Traurig several years ago.
“It became increasingly a no-brainer that Barnes and Thornburg would be the perfect fit for me,” Sarokhanian said.
Vital said Sarokhanian’s command and presence in a courtroom make him a “star.”
“Nick is an outstanding first chair trial lawyer and we’re always glad to have somebody of his caliber and with his depth of experience on our bench of trial lawyers,” Vital said.
When he’s not commanding a courtroom or deposition room in his suit and tie, Sarokhanian can be spotted on his wife’s show sporting a flannel with their six kids climbing on him. Sometimes, parties in his cases recognize him.
One time, Sarokhanian recalled, a witness approached him and whispered, “I know you’re not nasty. I’ve seen you on TV with all those kids.”
“It’s a great icebreaker with clients and colleagues,” Sarokhanian said.
When the couple went to Minnesota during the pandemic, they put their Dallas home on Airbnb. They eventually sold the home to their neighbor who, Sarokhanian said, tore it down and built an art gallery.
Katie’s childhood home in Stillwater, meanwhile, was up for sale. It had been out of the family about 30 years, and she would longingly drive by it on visits, her husband said. So the couple bought the house and filmed two seasons of The Art of Vintage there, he said.
Sarokhanian serves on his kids’ school board and coaches several of their sports teams (his fifth-grade girls basketball team just celebrated an undefeated season).
“It’s basically a wonderful, wonderful place, and the piece that was missing was getting integrated up here while maintaining my Texas roots and my Dallas presence,” Sarokhanian said.
Read more from The Lawbook’s interview with Sarokhanian below. It has been edited for clarity.
What has the response been like from your existing clients?
They love it. They love working with me, and we look forward to continuing our relationship. Everyone knew the firm. Everyone was pleased that it was a good firm that I could go to and still serve them in their geographic locations and needs and also have flexibility on ways to approach and price things in a way that makes sense for both sides. So they’re very pleased.
Your practice is pretty varied. (Sarokhanian represents clients in cases involving trade secrets and non-competes and his clients come from a variety of business sectors including healthcare, real estate and technology.)
I have a very broad commercial litigation practice. The through-line is, it’s got to be high stakes and it’s got to have a good probability of requiring somebody to stand up in a courtroom.
I have a tremendous amount of trial experience for someone who’s only been in big law. I have 15-plus trials and arbitrations, and that would be in state court, federal court, civil trials, criminal trials, bench trials, jury trials, a trial in bankruptcy court. Also, I had the honor of being one of the first people to have an in-person oral argument in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia, after they were resuming after the pandemic — so I have appellate court experience, too.
Regardless of the industry, clients that have important significant matters with either big exposure or a big business positional issues at risk that need somebody who can not only be a good strategic thinker, or a good person to handle discovery, but most importantly, take those key depositions, get those key preliminary injunctions in court and go to trial when necessary — That’s when they call me.
What are the trends that you’re seeing?
So there’s a couple of trends. One is, there’s somewhat of a commoditization of less sophisticated work. I’ve been working with clients on doing mass arbitrations. A lot of times arbitrations or litigation can be cost prohibitive to do them on an individualized basis. But I’ve been very adept at using technology, including generative AI, to present solutions to clients that use software to track and manage hundreds or thousands of cases and automate document preparation, allowing clients to suddenly aggregate all of these claims that were otherwise cost prohibitive to pursue or defend. So you have, on the one hand, some commoditization, but then you also have clients being increasingly selective and picky when picking counsel to handle their largest cases and problems. Those matters tend to go to lawyers like me who can handle cases like that. And within the population of sophisticated lawyers who are adept at those cases, clients are finding ways to further narrow the group of lawyers they choose, such as finding the right lawyer at a firm that offers fair and predictable pricing or alternative fee structures, making it all the more important to be at a platform that allows me to offer that.
On the issue of noncompetes, we are expecting the FTC to come down with its new rules any day now. Do you think the FTC is going to come down with a complete ban and, if so, what do you think is going to be the domino effect?
It’s hard to predict, but the thing that I say to my clients and to other people who ask about it is, thankfully, the common law has been very durable for many, many years, and it’s adaptable and covers all sorts of misconduct. Regardless of what may or may not happen with the FTC, there are other avenues to protect their rights and to enforce their contracts and protect their investments and goodwill. For example, the tried-and-true tort tortious interference claim can be very helpful, and where applicable companies can bring trade-secret or unfair-competition claims, too. So clients can still protect themselves either via the typical contractual claims — by enforcing confidentiality or nonsolicitation provisions (which are usually treated differently than noncompetition provisions that may be curtailed or banned at the federal or, increasingly, state level) — or via some of the tort claims I mentioned. We’ll wait and see, and obviously everyone will be paying attention to that the FTC decides to do and what states decide to do. But I don’t see, by fiat, unfair competition suddenly being rendered fair.