Top 200 US firm Armstrong Teasdale has hired a team of four intellectual property partners from Phillips & Leigh in London as it seeks to broaden its European coverage.

The quartet include Jim Boff, Martin Hammler, Arthur Boff and James McAllister, who will be joined by a number of support staff. The team focuses on a range of IP, including patents, trademarks, designs, domain name registrations and copyright. They also provide advice on IP strategy.

Patrick Rasche, managing partner at Armstrong Teasdale, said: “The experience of this team is impressive. The lawyers have acted for clients across a wide range of technical disciplines, and their varied backgrounds enable them to quickly and efficiently serve clients from startups to multinational companies.”

Patent veteran Jim Boff had been with Phillips & Leigh for more than 36 years. His practice focuses on patent prosecution, opposition and portfolio management, trademark and licensing matters. Hammler arrives after almost 29 years at Phillips & Leigh, where he has advised on patent-related issues for multinationals, small and medium-sized enterprises and individual inventors.

Arthur Boff, meantime, joins after 14 years at Phillips & Leigh. He brings with him a technical background in chemistry applied to areas such as power generation, haptic feedback and difficult-to-patent areas such as computer-related inventions. Trademark specialist McAllister was a more recent arrival, joining Phillips & Leigh in 2017. He previously worked at Fieldfisher and Marks & Clerk.

Jim Boff said: “We have always prided ourselves on providing excellent services focusing on our clients’ success, which we were pleased to see is also a core value of Armstrong Teasdale. Such synergies will serve our clients well and ease our assimilation in this next chapter.”

The quartet are the latest additions to Armstrong Teasdale’s London office, which opened in February last year following the acquisition of Kerman & Co – a relatively rare transatlantic expansion for a US firm outside the Am Law top 100 rankings. Since then, it has added more than a dozen lawyers in London across practice areas including corporate, litigation, white collar, immigration, employment, IP and sport. The firm also opened in Dublin in March this year.