Howrey hires IP star from Clinton team

Washington DC firm Howrey Simon Arnold & White is taking on the director of the US Patent and Trademark Office from the Clinton administration as a partner.

Todd Dickinson, also under secretary of commerce for intellectual property (IP), will lead the IP licensing, counselling, prosecution and patent portfolio management practice. The firm already boasts the world's biggest IP department since the merger of Washington's Howrey & Simon and Houston's Arnold White & Durkee last year (The Lawyer, 12 January 2000).

Dickinson says the firm will continue to build on that. "We're not planning to stand still and wait for others to catch up," he says. "We'll continue to develop a cutting-edge IP practice in the US and globally, and we intend to reinvent the IP transactional practice and concentrate on strategic IP management."

The firm opened a London office at the beginning of this year, headed by Koos Rasser, the former general counsel and vice-president for IP at Procter & Gamble.