Marc Katz has departed DLA Piper, where he was chair of the national employment practice and managing partner of its Dallas office, for the fast-growing Vartabedian Hester & Haynes.
Leading an employment team of at least six attorneys initially, according to a firm announcement, Katz is joining as a name partner. The firm is now called Vartabedian Katz Hester & Haynes.
Katz and Rob Vartabedian say they have long wanted to practice together and have each tried to recruit one another to join their prior firms.
Vartabedian said from the firm’s launch two years ago, the vision has been to have a practice-focused boutique, and one of the practices they thought would be highly successful was an employment and labor practice.
“And the employment and labor practice that we wanted the most was Marc and Todd [Mobley’s],” he said.
“I admire a lot of things about Marc’s practice, but he has a really loyal team, which has become increasingly rare in the legal world. I think that is a very strong sign of somebody who’s doing things the right way.”
Katz, who joined one of the largest law firms in the world with his move to DLA Piper eight years ago from Andrews Kurth, said there were two main drivers in deciding the 30-plus-lawyer Vartabedian Hester & Haynes was the right fit.
“I’ve always wanted my practice to be able to focus on the clients and the clients’ interests, and be able to align myself fully in a holistic way with the clients that I represent. And having the model like they do at our new firm is going to allow me to do that in a really fantastic way,” Katz said.
“The second driver was to be able to practice with lawyers of the caliber of Rob and his partners. This is a really great merging of two things that I’ve been very interested in for my whole career, and I’m extremely excited about the success that’s ahead of us.”
Katz has significant experience representing corporate clients in high-stakes trade secret, employee mobility, restrictive covenant and unfair competition litigation, as well as fiduciary duty and partnership disputes and collective and class action litigation cases throughout the country. He said his team will be bringing over a significant amount of work from their existing clients, covering the spectrum on management-side labor and employment work.
Since starting with an energy litigation team from Alston & Bird two years ago, Vartabedian Hester & Haynes has built up practices in corporate restructuring, white-collar and investigations, and employment through additions from Forshey Prostok, Winstead, Holland & Knight, Butler Snow, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas.
Vartabedian said the firm expects to be at full capacity in Dallas with the latest additions. When asked what is next for the firm’s expansion plans, Vartabedian quickly answered, “Rest.”