Late last month Coughlin Stoia announced that they were adding an intellectual property litigation group with the addition of partners John C. Herman and Ryan K. Walsh from Duane Morris LLP. This of course garnered a decent amount of press coverage here and here, for example.

The names of the new Coughlin Stoia partners seemed familiar to us, a little too familiar for someone who doesn't dabble in the intellectual property field.

So we scratched our brains and came up with a nice little twist to the story.

Let's go back in time to November 2002. The Coughlin Stoia firm does not yet exist. But the predecessor firm, Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach started copyrighting the complaints they filed in securities class actions, and having outside counsel send cease and desist letters to other law firms that had allegedly plagiarized those complaint.

Milberg Weiss' outside intellectual property counsel - you guessed it John C. Herman from Duane Morris.

The Fulton County Daily Report has a story on the cease and desist letters here and the ABA Journal has a story (via an unrelated blog) here.

Herman had more recently worked with his new firm in the Home Depot derivative litigation. The WSJ Law Blog has a story, here.