Business news in brief

Center City law firm Blank Rome has announced that 24 lawyers and staff from a Houston-based intellectual property firm have joined its growing office there.

Alan Hoffman, Blank Rome's chairman and managing partner, said the new lawyers and staff, who came from the firm of Wong, Cabello, Lutsch, Rutherford & Brucculeri, will bolster the firm's national intellectual property practice and work closely with its lawyers in San Francisco serving Wang Cabello's Silicon Valley clients. Blank Rome, which has a total of 540 lawyers, opened its Houston office in 2011, and since then focused on corporate matters, litigation, and maritime law there. The firm has 15 offices in the United States and China.

As part of its expansion in Houston, Blank Rome moved into new offices on June 1, a 27,144 square foot space in the city's downtown. - Chris Mondics

National Hockey League fans could have more options and lower prices with digital viewing packages if a New York judge approves a settlement between Philadelphia plaintiffs attorney Ned Diver and the hockey league, lawyers for both sides said Tuesday.

If approved, the NHL will offer out-of-market, single-team packges of streamed games for about $105 for next season. For the just-ended season, NHL fans could buy only a package of all out-of-market NHL teams for $159.99. New York District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin has to approve the settlement for it to go through. The antitrust case against the NHL, Major League Baseball and regional sports networks was filed in 2012. Major League Baseball has not settled. - Bob Fernandez

American Realty Capital Hospitality Trust will acquire the Hyatt Place hotel in Princeton in a deal to buy 13 hotels in nine states for $300 million, the company said in a statement.

The New York-based investment trust plans to purchase the portfolio of hotels from affiliates of Noble Investment Group, a hospitality real estate private equity firm in Atlanta.

The deal, along with other recent acquisitions, would bring ARC Hospitality's total portfolio to 166 hotels with nearly 20,200 rooms across 34 states, the company said. It is expected to close over the fourth quarter of this year and the first quarter of 2016, pending franchiser approvals and other conditions. - Jacob Adelman

In some of his first public comments since announcing he was stepping down, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was tight-lipped about his successor but said his replacement would have the space to lead the company forward.

"I don't have any ego about 'you have to do this this way,' " he said at the Bloomberg Technology Conference in San Francisco. "There are so many different ways to be successful."

"We tend to create these mythologies about great CEOs, and the problem with those is they sort of get boiled down to this almost comic book notion of what that person was like."

Costolo announced his departure days after early Twitter investor Chris Sacca wrote an 8,500-word essay about what is and isn't working well in the company. Twitter has struggled to attract new users and disappointed analysts with its first-quarter earnings, sending the stock plummeting by about 18 percent in April. - San Jose Mercury News

Starbucks said that it is launching its mobile order program in more than half of the stores it owns in the U.S.

The move follows an initial pilot program launched last December in Portland, Ore., and expanded three months later to about 600 locations across the Pacific Northwest.

Mobile ordering and pay is a key initiative for Starbucks, which seeks to lure more customers into using its app and joining its reward program, whose members tend to spend more at its cafes.

The mobile ordering procedure - through which a customer can place an order online through a smartphone and pick it up directly at the counter a few minutes later - also helps cut time spent in line at rush hour.

Lengthy waiting times have become more of a problem as Starbucks increases the complexity of its menu with pastries and lunch options.

The company is also expected to soon start testing a delivery feature in Seattle and New York.

So far, mobile ordering is available only on Starbucks' iOS app, although the company said an Android app is in the works and will be launched later this year.

- Seattle Times

Chase branches will no longer offer coin-counting services to customers after July 1.

Chase has coin-counting machines in many Midwest branches. The bank will still accept coins, but they must be in wrappers. Business customers will have to use tamper-proof coin bags. Wrappers will be free.

Spokeswoman Christine Holevas said in a statement that "counting coins, whether manually or via a machine, slows service to our customers."

She said branches in most of the bank's other markets do not have coin-counting machines. "It seems to be a Midwest thing," she said.

- Chicago Tribune