SYRACUSE — An Albany–based law firm with its sights set on 10 nationwide offices in the next five years will set up its next location in Syracuse.

Tully Rinckey PLLC plans to open its local office in April with three attorneys and expects to expand to seven in the following year. The firm is aiming for 10 attorneys in Syracuse within about two years after opening here.

Tully Rinckey started in Albany about seven years ago and then expanded to Washington, D.C. and Arlington, Va. Rather than spend years and years building a large firm in a single geography through challenging local recruiting, Tully Rinckey decided to expand through establishing a number of smaller offices in different markets, Founding Partner Mathew Tully says.

For its fourth office, the firm explored markets including White Plains, Maryland, and the Springfield, Mass. area. The firm liked the potential for two offices working in the same state and so settled on starting its next location in New York.

“What really made us like Syracuse was the commonality of law with our Albany office,” Tully says.

Plus, starting up in Syracuse is far less expensive than in White Plains, near New York City, he adds.

Practice areas at Tully Rinckey include matrimonial law, trusts and estates, criminal defense, real estate, and general litigation. Filling the Syracuse office with experienced lawyers in those areas will be the firm’s top priority, Tully says.

That doesn’t mean the firm won’t expand into other areas if the right attorney with a slightly different practice focus comes along, he adds.

The firm aims to recruit mid-level lawyers from other firms and has sent nearly 3,800 letters to attorneys within an hour’s drive of Syracuse. Tully says he wants to attract attorneys with experience, but not those at a senior level.

“A mid-level person might be making $90,000 a year, but generating $400,000 in revenue for that firm,” Tully says. “That’s the perfect candidate for us.”

One of Tully Rinckey’s experienced attorneys will move to Syracuse to help start the local office. The firm is already in talks with two local attorneys about joining, Tully adds.

After launching Syracuse, Tully Rinckey expects to continue its expansion west. The firm plans to open offices in both Rochester and Buffalo, including launching in one of those two cities by the end of 2012.

Overall, the firm’s goal is to employ more than 100 attorneys in the next three to five years, Tully says. The firm currently employs 84 people total, including more than 30 attorneys.

Tully Rinckey started in Washington, D.C. in 2008. That office now has 14 attorneys. It opened its third office, in Arlington, in 2010.  

FAYETTEVILLE — Kevin Hunt, formerly at the Sugarman Law Firm in Syracuse, has joined Gale & Dancks, LLC of Fayetteville.

The firm’s name will change to Gale Gale & Hunt, LLC as Hunt comes on board. He is joining the firm as Thérèse Wiley Dancks, who helped Catherine Gale found the practice in 1997, leaves for an eight-year appointment to the federal bench as magistrate judge for the Northern District of New York.

Gale and Dancks previously worked together at Syracuse–based Mackenzie Hughes LLP.

When the firm announced Dancks was leaving, Gale says she started getting lots of calls — inquiries from attorneys looking to join up with her firm and calls from other firms looking to merge.

When she received a call from Hunt, she says she knew she had found her answer.

“He’s very experienced in the trial world,” Gale says. “He’s well known in upstate New York. A lot of our clients know him. The judges know him. It was just a natural fit.”

Gale Gale & Hunt focuses on litigation and represents corporations, hospitals, and doctors, frequently in malpractice cases. The firm often takes its cases to trial, Gale says, so landing a lawyer with experience in the courtroom was a boon.

“Kevin called and immediately, we knew he was the person for us,” she adds. “He’s tried 50 cases to verdict.”

Hunt and Dancks were actually law-school classmates, Gale says, and graduated the same year from the Syracuse University College of Law.

Hunt also has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Washington & Lee University. His practice focuses on defense of medical, dental, and legal malpractice claims and the defense of catastrophic personal injury claims.

Hunt’s hiring comes on the heels of a growth spurt for Gale Gale & Hunt, Gale says. The firm added three new attorneys in 2011 and now has seven on staff.

The law firm also employs five paralegals and added a nurse practitioner last year as well. Many of its cases involve medical matters so the nurse helps with those and educates the staff on various health-care issues, Gale says.

The growth has been driven by the firm’s reputation and word of mouth from clients, Gale says. Two new clients in insurance that came on board last year had actually faced off against Gale Gale & Hunt in court.

“We were on the other side and they were impressed with the work we did for their opposition,” Gale says. “They’re both out-of- state companies. So when they needed local counsel, they called us.”    

SYRACUSE — Syracuse–based Ephesus Technologies, LLC is moving forward with its expansion plans.

The company’s efforts were among the projects submitted to the state as part of Central New York’s regional economic development plan last year. But Ephesus was not among those chosen for funding as part of the process, which involved a competition among 10 regions around the state for a limited pool of aid.

The firm did win a $150,000 grant from Empire State Development. And, in recent weeks, the company found out it will receive $200,000 from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and $50,000 through the Commercialization Assistance Program at the Syracuse Center of Excellence.

The funding will allow Ephesus to push ahead with its growth strategy, President Joe Casper says. The company is commercializing its own line of LED lighting fixtures as well as a next-generation LED chip in partnership with Group4 Labs of Fremont, Calif.

Ephesus plans to relocate its headquarters later this year from the Tech Garden in downtown Syracuse to a 10,000-square-foot space in the Radisson section of the town of Lysander. The facility will also house manufacturing space, Ephesus Chairwoman and CEO Amy Casper says.

Joe and Amy Casper co-own the company.

The company’s current lighting products are suited for applications such as warehouses, parking garages, and manufacturing floors, among other things. One of its lights has been certified through the DesignLights Consortium, a group of energy- efficiency organizations and utilities aiming to raise awareness of efficient lighting.

The certification will provide a boost for Ephesus since it will allow customers using its lights to qualify for rebates and other incentives, Joe Casper says.

The firm is also on the verge of introducing a new product for use in street lighting applications, Joe Casper adds.

Ultimately, the company’s largest potential market is on the LED chip front, he says. That’s because the components could be used in Ephesus’ own lights, but also sold to other lighting companies.

The overall market for LED chips potentially totals in the billions of dollars, according to Ephesus. The company says its chip is expected to lower the cost of its own fixtures by 30 percent.

In addition to the new chip, Ephesus is working with Onondaga Community College and Clarkson University on creating an intelligent lighting system. The NYSERDA funding will go toward that work.

The system will eventually be able to monitor the status and condition of the lights and handle tasks like dimming automatically, Joe Casper says.

Along with the state funding, the company is exploring options for outside investment, Amy Casper says. The firm is looking at partnering with venture-capital firms and angel investors, she says.    

DeWITT  —  You might be hearing more about Datacom Systems Inc. now that Kevin Formby is the company’s president and CEO.

At the very least, potential clients will probably be hearing more about the DeWitt manufacturer.

“My background is in sales and marketing, so I’ve been brought on board to put more resources and more emphasis on sales and marketing,” Formby says. “In this field it’s good to be close to your clients.”

Datacom Systems manufactures devices for data networks, such as network test-access points (TAP). It also has a software-development group and creates software to manage those devices.

A TAP allows an administrator to monitor a network to make sure it is properly transmitting data, Formby says.

“You imagine the FBI tapping a line — well, it’s the kind of modern equipment that’s used for tapping the lines,” he says. “And then people put very specific equipment on the end of it to monitor the quality of the lines. You can actually see where packets [of data] are dropped and can’t get through.”

The company’s products are in demand in the financial-services industry, according to Formby. He declined to name any of Datacom Systems’ clients, but said its products are used by credit-card companies, stock exchanges, and banks.

The company is headquartered in a 16,800-square-foot facility at 9 Adler Drive in DeWitt. Datacom purchased the structure in 2002 for $920,000, according to records from the Onondaga County Office of Real Property Tax Services. The manufacturer assembles and tests devices in that building, although it subcontracts production of circuit boards.

Datacom Systems also has a four-person software-development group in Utica. The company employs 26 people in DeWitt for a total of 30 full-time workers.

That total is about to grow, as the company is planning to open a sales office in London within a month. That office will employ about four people, Formby says.

“We do have a market in Europe and we use resellers, but it’s very difficult to support large opportunities remotely,” he says. “We need some local sales presence [in Europe].”

Formby declined to share revenue totals for Datacom Systems. However, he said that the company is planning to grow with its industry in 2012.

“The market we operate in is growing at around 40 percent a year, and we aim to grow at least the market rate,” he says.

Formby’s background

Formby started at Datacom Systems at the beginning of February. Before that, he was the vice president of business development at New Zealand–based Endace Ltd. (LSE: EDA.L), a data-capture and analysis hardware and software firm that operates U.S. offices in New York City, Atlanta, Chicago, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C.

Formby was based in Atlanta. In fact, he says he plans to continue living there for a year until his youngest daughter graduates from high school. In the meantime, he will be traveling between Atlanta, Syracuse, and Datacom Systems’ clients.

“I’m the kind of person who visits a lot of customers,” Formby says. “We have a lot of clients all over the United States. It’s not as if I’m in the office a lot.”

He is a graduate of Birmingham University in the United Kingdom and has a first-class honors degree in electrical and communications engineering. Formby is also a national of both the United States and the United Kingdom.

Coming to Datacom Systems was attractive because of the company’s technology, Formby says. He was familiar with the manufacturer through his previous work at Endace, he adds.

Formby proposed joining Datacom Systems several months ago, he says.

“It was me kind of approaching them,” he says. “I thought I could do a great job here.”

Datacom Systems’ location in the Syracuse area gives it several advantages, according to Formby. It has access to universities, like Syracuse, and manufacturing costs are reasonable, he says.

And the city’s location is a plus because it is relatively close to New York City and Chicago, he says. Those cities are important sources of business because of their financial-services industries.

Many of Datacom Systems’ competitors are farther away in California in Silicon Valley, Formby says. Those competitors include Milpitas, Calif.–based Gigamon and Santa Clara, Calif.–based Net Optics.

Formby says he will try to increase Datacom Systems’ visibility in the press. But he is not a fan of trade shows as a way to build sales and improve marketing.

“You’ll have salespeople giving out colored pens to people who walk by,” he says. “That’s not the way to build the market. What I’m interested in is what I would call leadership events.”

Formby envisions Datacom Systems putting on smaller events in New York City where he and other company staff members talk about new technological developments and how they fit into the market. The idea is to get close to customers and understand their needs, he says.

The former president and CEO of Datacom Systems, which was founded in 1992 in Syracuse, was Sam Lanzafame. He held those positions since 2005 and is remaining with the company as its chairman.

The company’s majority owner is Wellesley, Mass.–based Gemini Investors, which acquired its stake in the manufacturer in 2008. Several company managers are also minority owners, Formby says.