A team of Bay Area patent prosecutors, including three partners, has left Morrison & Foerster for Dentons.

The partners include Peter Yim and Brian Ho, who joined Dentons' San Francisco office, and Christopher Eide, who joined the firm's office in Palo Alto. Eleven associates and five patent agents and analysts followed them in the move.

At least two of the team members had held leadership roles at MoFo. Eide was managing partner of the firm's Palo Alto office from 2011 to 2013, and Yim led the firm's electronics, software and telecommunications patent prosecution group as recently as this January.

"Dentons provides us with the best platform to deliver the highest quality work and most creative solutions that our clients demand and deserve," Yim said in a statement released by the firm. "We look forward to working with the superb group of lawyers at Dentons and an incredibly strong patent prosecution team across the U.S. and the globe."

None of the new hires was immediately available for additional comment. In a statement, Dentons U.S. chief executive officer Mike McNamara said the move "certainly reinforces that Dentons has the world's number one patent prosecution team."

MoFo's intellectual property practice has experienced a fair amount of churn in the Bay Area of late. Though the firm raided Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati earlier this year, bringing on a group of six IP litigators led by partners Stefani Shanberg and Jennifer Schmidt in May and life sciences licensing attorney Scott Carter in June, it saw the retirement late last year of Harold McElhinny, who led Apple Inc.'s smartphone patent war against Samsung. Another star litigator who played a leading role in the Apple-Samsung trials, Rachel Krevans, died at 60 this month.

Dentons hasn't achieved unmitigated growth in California this summer either. It lost Jaikaran "Jai" Singh, a consumer law, finance and class action partner in San Diego, to Foley & Lardner earlier in July. Singh is one of several former McKenna Long & Aldridge partners to have left Dentons following a tumultuous 2015 tie-up between the two firms.

Rebecca Cohen covers the business of law from the West Coast. Contact her at rcohen2@alm.com. On Twitter: @rebeccatcohen.