In what appears to be the result of ramped-up recruiting efforts out of its Newark office, Duane Morris has hired a four-lawyer corporate transactional group away from LeClairRyan.

As of April 8, partners James Seery and Dean Colucci, along with two others, joined the firm, which had enlisted a headhunter’s help only months earlier to beef up its nonlitigation practice in Newark, according to Walter Greenhalgh, who manages the office.

One of the recruits will be based in the New York office.

“A lot of your good, solid corporate partners in law firms are very happy doing what they’re doing,” Greenhalgh said in an interview. “Good candidates are rare.”

Though corporate makes up the second-largest practice at Philadelphia-based Duane Morris, behind trial litigation, according to Greenhalgh, the Newark office has rostered only one lawyer on the corporate side: David Sussman, who focuses on corporate tax matters.

“We want to be ... reflective here in Newark” of the firm’s overall practice, Greenhalgh added.

Seery and Colucci handle capital markets matters, as well as mergers and acquisitions.

Also making the move was associate Kelly Dabek, who joined LeClairRyan as a freshly minted associate in 2012.

The fourth lawyer—technically a law clerk at the moment—is Leigh Krafchek, an Australian national who had only recently joined LeClairRyan. Krafchek, now a dual citizen and New York resident, had been practicing in Australia since 2011 and currently is awaiting bar admission in New York. He became acquainted with Seery and Colucci through transactions the latter two worked on in Australia, and will practice out of the New York office upon admission.

For several years, there’s been something of a passive search for transactional attorneys—including corporate, real estate and intellectual property—for Duane Morris’ Newark office.

“We weren’t really getting much traction,” Greenhalgh said, and the firm launched a targeted search as of January.

The search turned up Seery, with whom Greenhalgh had crossed paths in the 1990s at Newark’s Robinson, St. John & Wayne.

A successor firm to Robinson St. John was acquired by LeClairRyan as of January 2008, though Seery made other stops in the interim: He was with Thelen Reid & Priest from 1995 to 1999, and then spent 11 years at DLA Piper, where he practiced alongside Colucci.

Seery was recruited to LeClairRyan in 2010 by attorneys he knew from the Robinson St. John contingent prior to the merger, he said in an interview.

“They were kind enough to take me back,” he said.

To Seery, Colucci has been both partner and client. Colucci spent the same 11-year period at DLA Piper and in 2010 joined New York-based investment bank MLV & Co., first as managing director and general counsel, then president and head of investment banking. While there, he engaged LeClairRyan as outside counsel, he said.

Colucci went on to join LeClairRyan about a year ago.

“When the two of us came back together in ‘15, we were able to grow our practice,” Colucci said of Seery.

According to Seery, when the two were contacted on Duane Morris’ behalf, “we were looking for more capital markets focus and more industry reach for our underwriting clients.”

Colucci added: “It’s really the ability to have similar resources to what we had six years ago” at DLA Piper. “It came down to, where can Jim and I build our practices over the longer term?”

Duane Morris offered a more substantial corporate department and significant work with real estate investment trusts, as well as a stable of clients in the energy industry, the two new partners said.

Greenhalgh pointed out that Duane Morris has more offices in the U.S. than LeClairRyan, as well as a presence in Asia and London.

“LeClair is not an AmLaw 100 law firm; Duane Morris is,” he said.

That much is true. In last year’s survey by Law Journal affiliate The American Lawyer, LeClairRyan ranked 167th, with $150.5 million in gross revenue and $370,000 in profit per equity partner (PPP). Duane Morris ranked 70th, with $428 million in revenue and a PPP figure of $900,000.

“I think our compensation—together with the opportunities that will develop in our expanded platform—is what attracted them,” Greenhalgh said.

The LeClairRyan departure was amicable, according to Seery and Colucci, who described the atmosphere at that firm as collegial and friendly. Firm leaders were “understanding enough to know our clients are demanding some additional resources,” Seery said.

LeClairRyan, asked about the moves, did not provide a comment.

Word of the new additions came soon after a report by the Daily Business Review, also a Law Journal affiliate, that Duane Morris had hired a group away from Carlton Fields Jorden Burt in Miami. Those additions came in tax and other practices, according to the report.

LeClairRyan has been no stranger to expansion itself. The firm, founded in Richmond, Virginia, has gone from roughly 60 attorneys to more than 300 in the past 15 years. The Newark office, opened with the 2008 acquisition of 45-lawyer Seiden Wayne, has about 60 lawyers, according to the firm’s website.

Reprinted with permission from New Jersey Law Journal, © ALM Media Properties LLC. All rights reserved.