SAN DIEGO – Marking 80 years as a San Diego institution and leveraging its role as one of the region’s biggest law firms, Procopio is executing on its growth strategy under Managing Partner Dennis Doucette. Doucette took the top role in the fall of 2024 following the untimely death of his predecessor, John Alessio.
Doucette and Procopio Partner Marie Burke Kenny recently checked in with the San Diego Business Journal to discuss their firm’s plans to grow, particularly in the California market.
They also talked about creating a supportive workplace culture and the role of artificial intelligence in a law practice, as well as the changes to their individual specialties over time. Doucette concentrates on capital markets, securities and M&A, while Burke Kenny specializes in labor and employment law.
Doucette and Kenny started work with Procopio after leaving Luce Forward Hamilton & Scripps when that firm was sold.
Their conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: I understand you and Dennis both joined Procopio at about the same time.
Marie Burke Kenny: Yes, within a week or two of each other. We had both been law partners and leaders at Luce Forward. Luce Forward had been around San Diego for 120-something years, and was in the process of essentially being acquired by a larger national law firm. And we just didn’t see that that was going to be a great fit. And without each other knowing, we had both applied with two of our law partners to come to Procopio. I remember being called into a leadership meeting at Luce Forward, and they were saying that the corporate guys were going to this other firm. It wasn’t a positive conversation and I knew I was going to be announcing a day or two later.
I think Dennis and I shared a vision from an early stage about the importance of having culture. And there is something about having a firm that’s rooted in San Diego or rooted in Southern California, and then you can scale from there and keep the culture. And I think that was important, and we saw the real opportunity to have a great platform here at Procopio.
Dennis Doucette: We were pleasantly surprised when we found out we both ended at the same place.
The main reason was we got acquired by an East Coast firm who really had no California presence to speak of. Most of my clients back then were in California and really wanted to have a California firm, but also more of a San Diego firm.
I’d known a lot of the partners [at Procopio] for a number of years through different events and social circles, and it just seemed to be the perfect fit. And quite honestly, it changed my life. I really was a little bit down towards the end of the tenure at Luce Forward. I was actually the M&A lawyer for the law firm at the time, and had to resign the day before [the deal] closed. It was just a good group of people and just far exceeded expectations.
Q: Both of you brought your individual emphases to Procopio, and I understand the firm changed a bit because of that.
Marie Burke Kenny: One of the things that Procopio leadership did at that time that I was impressed with was that they met with us pretty quickly and said, OK, give us a postmortem on what went wrong, why Luce Forward couldn’t survive, so that we make sure we don’t do that. And I think that was really thoughtful and insightful for them to ask those questions, and I think it also helped us understand even more clearly that we thought it was important to have a large firm headquartered in Southern California so we had stability and identity as we would scale across California and not grow just for the sake of growth, but grow strategically.
Dennis Doucette: I think the big part of it is most of my clients were in North San Diego County. A lot of biotech, a lot of technology companies, a lot in South Orange County. So they did agree to have us open a Del Mar Heights office. And that was a big move, because they’d really been a San Diego downtown-only office with a few lawyers maybe in Carlsbad.
And so that was strategic. It helped set the blueprint for the other offices that we did open.
We had strong partners …. As Marie said, [it was] not to just open for the sake of opening.
There was a strategy there. There were strong partners there, and a real interest in growing the offices, but again, not to just grow without a strategy in mind.
Marie Burke Kenny: I think our expansion into Palo Alto and Orange County really reflect that strategy to build, using regional leaders, hiring people, recruiting people in the Palo Alto area who were already thriving elsewhere. And same [applies] in Orange County. Now our Orange County [location] is expanded to 30 lawyers. We just had our inaugural annual Labor Employment Seminar in Orange County yesterday, so it’s an exciting time for us.
Q: I assume you were a speaker at that seminar.
Marie Burke Kenny: Yes. I live in Carlsbad so it’s almost equidistant to San Diego as it is to our Orange County location.
Q: I was asking about how Procopio’s offerings changed at the time that you joined. Can you think of any other changes?
Marie Burke Kenny: When we got here, I don’t think there was a Diversity Committee. And candidly, I think we were at the very bottom, like in the 190s of AmLaw 200 firms in terms of our diversity score. And today, Patrick, you probably know the exact number, but we’ve been in the top 10 for the last five, six years, and we’re Mansfield Plus certified. And so I think that the strides we’ve made in terms of diversity are significant. We also back in about 2017, 2018 engaged in an enormous culture investment and created a culture playbook that we are still following to this day. As part of our strategic plan headed by Dennis, we’re looking at refreshing our culture again, because obviously that’s something that we can’t focus on too much. …
Dennis, can you think of other changes?
Dennis Doucette: The practice mix [has changed]. When Marie and I joined, we had maybe 80 or 90 lawyers. We were definitely less than 100. Now [we have] 180 lawyers [throughout the firm], so over the course of five or six years of pretty strong growth, getting into some practice areas like charter schools, Native American, expanding family law, trusts and estates. [These are] areas you don’t typically see firms of our size involved in, but we like that diversity of practices, diversity of areas. And I think that was really very positive move.
Marie Burke Kenny: It’s our 80-year anniversary this year, making us probably the oldest, and we are still the largest headquartered law firm in San Diego.
Q: Let me take you up to almost the present. Dennis, tell me about your transition to managing partner. Mr. Alessio passed away, I understand and what happened from there?
Dennis Doucette: It was one of those things where I was not really interested in being a managing partner. I had pretty much done everything in management in my career, except managing partner. And some trusted partners said, hey, you should be the managing partner. And of course, I said, hell no, we won’t go. [Eventually] I felt like if there were enough people that wanted me to do it, that I should probably do it. And so I had really no training, because obviously John has passed and I didn’t really get any of that.
But I love it. I’m passionate about the law firm. I’m passionate about our direction. We want to be the premier middle-market law firm in California. We’d like to expand to Los Angeles and San Francisco. We restructured how we practice law, as far as we had 11 practice teams. Now we have five. We organized the non-legal side of the business. We changed our partnership agreement. We changed some of our policies and procedures. I think all of those things have made the firm stronger.
We came off a very good year in 2025. I think we’re pretty well-positioned. As I said, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve certainly made some mistakes, but we have great partners who’ve helped me out, great management, great team leaders. Marie is one of my trusted advisors. She’s our employment counselor for the for the law firm, and so there’s been a lot of help navigating through challenging times.
Artificial intelligence is big. We made an investment in that platform. We made a big push in technology. So, a lot of positive things, a lot of change. Lawyers hate change, but we’ve tried to navigate that pretty well by really educating [people]. The first thing is educating partners and attorneys and staff, and then hopefully embedding that into our culture, into our approach. So with education and embedding, we’ve hopefully had some success.
Q: Let me talk a little bit about your plans for the future. Do you expect to expand beyond California and the Southwest?
Dennis Doucette: No.
Q: Do you expect to expand, period?
Dennis Doucette: In our strategic plan, by 2028, we should have a San Francisco office and a Los Angeles office. We have a lot of lawyers that live in Los Angeles. We just need to find that right group to get it started. And in San Francisco, it’s kind of open territory. We’d like to do that. So as I said that the goal is to be the premier California law firm focused on the middle market. We would be opportunistic in our other offices: D.C., Scottsdale, Las Vegas, but that would be more opportunistic. California is more strategic.
Q: It would seem to me that San Francisco would be a hard market to break into, but you’re already in Palo Alto, so you’re halfway there.
Dennis Doucette: Yeah, it’s definitely a hard market. And it’s, again, not for the sake of it. That’s a goal. If we don’t accomplish that in three years, so be it. But we’ve got to find the right fit of practices, culture and everything else.
Q: Would you look to be acquiring a firm or just growing it from scratch.
Marie Burke Kenny: I think if the right opportunity came along — right, Dennis? — we would be open to that. Again, it depends on culture fit, systems fit, client base fit. Merging or acquiring a smaller law firm is a complicated process in terms of conflicts of interest and all of that, but I think for the right opportunity, we would absolutely consider it, would you, Dennis?
Dennis Doucette: Yeah, I think probably the best way to get into San Francisco or Los Angeles would be a 15-, 20-person firm in either one of those cities. Maybe a little bit larger, could be smaller. But we’ve got to have some anchor partners there to really understand the market better than we do, in order to do that. But again, we wouldn’t do it just for the sake of doing it. It’s got to be strategic.
Q: Let me ask you both about your specialties. Marie, you work in labor and employment. What is the landscape like at the moment, and how has it changed from when you went to law school or when you started at Procopio?
Marie Burke Kenny: Oh, wow. Well, when I started doing employment law, it was mostly about wrongful termination and harassment and discrimination-type claims. A lot of single-plaintiff litigation, we call that. Today the litigation landscape for California employers is heavily focused on wage and hour representative cases, class actions and actions under the private attorney generals act, which we call PAGA for short. PAGA is definitely the least favorite four-letter word that employers deal with on a daily basis, because there’s hundreds of labor code provisions. And just one violation can launch this representative law enforcement action against an employer on behalf of the State of California, where employers face a lot of penalties. There are a lot of ‘gotcha’ things like the wage statement doesn’t have the letters I-N-C on there or Corp. on there. So wage and hour compliance and those types of litigation matters [are] still very much at the top of the list for compliance for employers.
I think there are some complications that have come in with some of the immigration activities at the federal level that don’t always line up with some of the state-level rules on how you can’t discriminate against a person based on their immigration status. So there’s some interesting counseling issues that we’re helping our clients navigate right now in California. What do you do when ICE shows up? Do they have a judicial warrant or do they have a court ordered warrant? And what’s the public area of your employer worksite?
What’s the private area where they can’t come in? And there’s a new law on the books for 2026 that you have to notify your employees of their right to tell you about a primary point of contact in the event that they are arrested at work or detained at work, so that you have to notify their family or their contact person. So California is being pretty progressive and thoughtful about how to deal with those issues, and yet, we’re kind of also bumping up against a lot more rigidity at the federal level.
Q: Dennis, let me ask you the same thing regarding capital markets, securities, M&A – what’s the landscape like now, and how has it changed since you first joined the law firm?
Dennis Doucette: I think, maybe not so much last year, but the five previous years were kind of the best market for M&A, especially capital markets and the like. There was a little bit of a slowdown regionally or nationally. But fortunately, I was as busy last year as I’d been previously.
I think the biggest change for me is the breadth of clients and the breadth of work that we do. When I first started, we did probably more of what we call sell-side business: we would sell the companies. Now we do as much buy-side work, representing buyers of companies [and similar transactions]. The good news in that is you get to keep the client after it’s done, which is really nice. [By contrast,] when you sell the client, most of the time, the buyer takes over or their counsel takes over.
San Diego is a big biotech market, and I think back then, I probably didn’t have a lot of biotech clients. Now I have a lot. Things like that. Just as the market has changed, we have a really strong life science practice at Procopio now, and I think that’s been a big change.
But I’ve been fortunate to have clients for 25-30 years and they take me all over the world, and I do very interesting deals and transactions with them, and that’s been very rewarding.
Q: Where has this taken you?
Dennis Doucette: I think I’ve done deals now in 30 countries. I just closed the deal for One Stop Systems. They sold their German subsidiary to an Israeli company. And in 2018 I represented One Stop when they bought that German company. And last year I did several deals in Japan, Korea, Malaysia. I’ve done a lot of deals in Latin America, throughout Europe, obviously the U.K. I did a deal in Austria. So yeah, it’s been nice.
We’re part of Meritas, which is an international network of law firms throughout the U.S., but also throughout the world. And so I use a lot of local counsel in the Meritas networks. That way we don’t have the overhead of offices all over the world, but we have excellent lawyers all over the world to answer questions pretty quickly.
Q: At the risk of repeating a question, let me ask you where you see the firm going.
Dennis Doucette: We’re celebrating our 80th anniversary. We’re going to hopefully steward it for the next 80 years. We believe that we provide good value to our clients, and I think we’ll continue to do that.
We give back in all our communities. [Founder] Alec Cory was the leader of that. He started San Diego Legal Aid, and a lot of the nonprofits, and we try to do that. I think that we’re hopefully going to continue to serve our clients well and have strategic growth, treat our people well, make it a great place for people to work and have people follow their passions. I think that’s our goal.
Q: Marie, how do you see this?
Marie Burke Kenny: I agree. I think that at the center of everything that we’re trying to do is we really want to make this not just a premier California firm for the middle market, but a law firm where everyone loves to work here. I think that’s really important to us.
And as a mother of six kids — when Dennis and I joined nearly 14 years ago, I had six kids between the ages of 3 and 9 — I think that the fact that I could ascend into leadership and be on the Management Committee for seven years and be a team leader and balance family life and personal life and work life is a reflection of the culture at Procopio. You can have a high performing career, but you also can have work/life balance, which is really important. And like Dennis said, we want to be here 80 years from now and continue our legacy of giving back to the community.
I’ve been very excited in the last couple of years that I have kids in high school and I’m helping out their mock trial team, and with the San Diego County mock trial competition, and my kids just battled the No. 1 school in San Diego, and they lost, but only by 0.5%!
And we’re looking to be in the top four. It’s just really cool to see the next generation of lawyers in high school and to be a part of that. Dennis has been very supportive of our mock trial team. We use conference room space at the firm, and we come back after court, and we debrief, and we get our game faces on there. So that’s just one way that I have the ability to balance career and it’s a really nice overlap between career and family at this time in my life.
Q: Do any of you have anything that you would like to add? Let me throw it over to you.
Marie Burke Kenny: I will say I’m excited about AI. I know that some attorneys of Dennis and my vintage, we can be lovingly referred to as techno-saurs, but I’m very excited that we are piloting and working through multiple different legal AI systems right now, and I’m excited about the future. I’m excited about seeing where it takes us and how it increases our talent. And so I think it’s a very exciting time to be a lawyer.
Q: How does AI make your work easier?
Marie Burke Kenny: I think people will say it cuts time down. If you’re a cautious AI user [and] I would describe myself as one, I’m an eager but cautious [user]. I check everything. Check, check, check.
I was in court just four weeks ago when the judge called aside an attorney and said, ‘Could you please explain why on page such and such of your brief, you described this case, and I’ve read that case and it doesn’t say that.’ And the attorney said, ‘Oh, sorry, Your Honor, that must be human error.’ And he said, ‘No, let’s try AI error. And if you were in front of any other judge right now, you’d get sanctioned. So don’t ever do that in my court or any other court.’ So I don’t think it’s going to make it faster. What I’m excited about is that the quality of the legal work, I think, is going to ultimately be better, and I do think that it will hopefully, in the long term, change how we deliver valuable services to our clients.
Q: That’s very positive. There are some times that I think AI is going to take away my job.
Marie Burke Kenny: I test AI all the time. It cannot replace the refinement of that sophisticated human thought. But it is a great aggregator. Not always accurate, but it’s a great aggregator of data.
Procopio
FOUNDED: 1946
MANAGING PARTNER: Dennis Doucette
HEADQUARTERS: Downtown San Diego
BUSINESS: Law firm
EMPLOYEES: 180 lawyers, plus support staff
WEBSITE: procopio.com
CONTACT: (619) 238-1900 or procopio.com/contact
NOTABLE: Procopio announced in January that it has been recognized as a top patent firm by Juristat.
