Fisher Phillips Names Greco New Head of Denver Office

Philidelphia transplant takes over for Denver office co-founder

By Doug Chartier
LAW WEEK COLORADO

Leading a Fisher Phillips office isn't new for Mike Greco. If anything, he's hoping to replicate in the Denver legal market the success he had out East. 

Greco is the new regional managing partner for the Denver office of employment law firm, Fisher Phillips, which has 33 offices in the U.S. He succeeds the office's co-founder, partner Todd Fredrickson, who led the Denver location since its inception in 2008. Greco relocated to Denver in 2015 from the firm's Philadelphia office, which he co-founded and led as that location's regional managing partner.

Greco already has a few priorities set for how he'd like to see the Denver office —which has 15 attorneys— expand further through 2017. "Our focus for the future here is growth while maintaining quality of practice," Greco said. He added that the office is diverse in terms of the attorneys' personal backgrounds and employment-related practice areas, which range from immigration and wage-and-hour law to trade secret law. He wants to continue diversifying and deepening the experience of the office, he said. 

Greco's litigation and counseling resume is hyper-focused on trade secrets and non-compete agreements, which have made up 100 percent of his practice for the past 20 years, he said. He has handled and litigated such cases in all 50 states, representing mostly large companies that have multi-state presence. 

Back in 2007, Greco opened Fisher Phillips' Philadelphia location with colleagues Chris Stief, who is now that office's regional managing partner, and David Erb, who is now a partner in the firm's Baltimore office. Prior to that, Greco worked with Stief at a Philadelphia boutique firm, Rubin & Associates, which was solely dedicated to representing Merrill Lynch in non-compete litigation. Greco and Stief would meet Erb after they joined Saul Ewing in 2002, and the three would carry their shared practice focus to Fisher Phillips in 2007. The new office resembled a boutique for restrictive covenants and trade secrets starting out. 

But it would eventually grow in breadth. There turned out to be a healthy demand for national counsel on trade secrets and non-compete matters, which implicate a motley of state laws. If a company had a new case spring up in Texas over a non-compete provision, it wouldn't have to seek a Texas-based lawyer to litigate the case it it already had someone like Greco with a grasp on the varying state laws. 

Growing an office organically from a boutique-like model turned out to be a successful strategy, Greco said. Leveraging the relationships the firm had with national companies in their niche practice, Greco and the other partners connected those companies with other attorneys throughout the large firm whenever they had other employment law needs. 

When presented the opportunity to come to Denver, Greco admitted that he was worried about "starting over" and working to establish a new network of businesses and fellow attorneys. "When I was considering  whether to leave Philadelphia... I had a network in place and relationships I valued," he said. 

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This article originally published by LAW WEEK COLORADO.