›We’ll Miss You, The Fish & Neave IP Group of Ropes & Gray
August 10, 2007
Right up there with MoFo and K&L Gates, one of the bolder Big Law branding moves in recent memory has to be the naming of The Fish & Neave Intellectual Property Group of Ropes & Gray. That mouthful of a practice group was branded as such after Ropes & Gray merged with IP boutique Fish & Neave in 2005. But, alas, last month the group changed its name to . . . the Ropes & Gray intellectual-property group.
Back in the mid-’90s when the Law Blog was looking for a Big Law job, we recall leafing through books at career services trying to differentiate one firm from the next. We’d come across all of these boutique intellectual property firms — Fish & Neave; Pennie & Edmonds; Lyon & Lyon. Picturing nerdy engineering types poring over diagrams of inventions, we’d move on to the next firm.
Then, over the past decade, intellectual property law — specifically, patent litigation — got hot, and these IP boutiques became the belles of the Big Law ball. And though there are still plenty of IP shops out there — Kenyon & Kenyon and Finnegan Henderson to name two — many of them were either snapped up or dissolved as big law firms picked off their partners. Pennie & Edmonds and Lyon & Lyon went bust.
And in 2005, Ropes & Gray merged with Fish & Neave, one of the more presitgious of the IP boutiques. To retain the firm’s “brand equity” — this, after all, is IP we’re talking about — Ropes & Gray came up with The Fish & Neave IP Group of Ropes & Gray. But now, says the firm, the goodwill of the brand has transferred to Ropes & Gray, and it became time to jettison the Fish & Neave name once and for all.
We’ll miss you, The Fish & Neave Intellectual Property Group of Ropes & Gray.‹
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