© 2018 The Texas Lawbook.
By Mark Curriden
(Feb. 23) – Los Angeles-based Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton is the latest large corporate law firm to expand into Texas.
A 90-year-old law firm with more than 800 lawyers in 15 offices worldwide, Sheppard Mullin is expected to announce in the next couple weeks that it is officially opening an outpost in Dallas. The firm reported $671 million in revenues in 2017 and revenues per lawyer of $989,000, according to the American Lawyer.
The Texas Lawbook has learned that Sheppard Mullin will open its Texas operation with a mixture of lawyers that it has recruited from existing Dallas law firms and lawyers it has relocated from other Sheppard Mullin offices.
Former Locke Lord intellectual property partner Jason Mueller, according to lawyers familiar with the marketplace, has already started at Sheppard Mullin. Mueller, a graduate of the SMU Dedman School of Law, has represented healthcare providers, medical device makers, Silicon Valley start-ups and energy companies in a plethora of patent infringement and copyright litigation matters. He had been a lawyer at Locke Lord for 14 years.
Sheppard Mullin is also expected to relocate current firm lawyers with North Texas connections to Dallas.
Multiple indications are that two Sheppard Mullin lawyers who are likely to move to Dallas are John Gross, a senior counsel in Sheppard Mullin’s Washington, D.C. office, and Michelle Ilczyszyn Nielson, a corporate transactional lawyer in the firm’s Century City office. Both have held positions as in-house counsel at North Texas companies.
Gross is an expert in labor and employment law and a former associate general counsel at Fort Worth-based American Airlines, where he worked as a lawyer from 1995 to 2014. He also served as a lawyer for the National Labor Relations Board for six years prior to joining American.
Nielson is a 1999 graduate of Trinity University and served as assistant general counsel of Addison-based investment management firm Behringer for more than five years. She joined Sheppard Mullin in 2016.
Three national law firms – Katten Muchin, Shearman & Sterling and White & Case – have opened offices in Texas so far this year.
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