Five Attorneys Defect From Irvine Office : Law: Exodus is second in six years at Kindel & Anderson. Those departing include managing partner, 2 associates.

The managing partner and two associate lawyers at the Irvine office of the Kindel & Anderson law firm resigned Wednesday to take jobs with the Costa Mesa office of a large Los Angeles firm, Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker.

Two other lawyers from Kindel & Anderson left on the same day to take other jobs, leaving the office with five lawyers and no one designated to take the helm, said William Yerkes, a partner in Kindel’s Los Angeles headquarters.

The defection is the office’s second in six years. In May, 1986, 25 lawyers in the Orange County office left to form the firm of Palmieri, Tyler, Wiener & Wilhelm. That firm actually operated out of the Newport Beach office that Kindel & Anderson had occupied, and six of the remaining lawyers moved to an office a block away to re-establish Kindel & Anderson’s Orange County branch.

On Wednesday, four secretaries were let go when the lawyers left, Yerkes said, and a paralegal resigned for unrelated reasons.

Yerkes said that the firm is in no financial trouble and will be “aggressively recruiting to replace the people who’ve left.”

He said former managing partner Glenn Dassoff had indicated that he was looking to join a firm that handles more national business. Dassoff did not return a telephone call Thursday.

Kindel & Anderson, founded in 1953, employs about 70 lawyers and has offices in Woodland Hills and San Francisco in addition to Los Angeles and Irvine. The firm is a general business practice doing corporate litigation and also handling cases involving real estate and tax matters, labor and employee benefits law.