(Reuters) - With only a week left in the year, Dentons on Tuesday announced yet another combination with a midsize U.S. law firm, this time in Alabama.

Dentons will combine with Sirote & Permutt, an 86-lawyer firm with offices in Birmingham, Huntsville, Tuscaloosa, the Shoals and Mobile. The announcement comes two weeks after Dentons said it was combining with Davis Brown, an 80-lawyer firm in Iowa.

The deal with Sirote is the fifth for Dentons since it launched its so-called Golden Spike strategy in October 2019, aiming to scale up across the United States. Since then firm has already added more than 400 lawyers to its ranks through combinations with Indianapolis-based Bingham Greenebaum Doll, Pittsburgh-based Cohen & Grigsby and Salt Lake City-based Durham Jones & Pinegar.

Bringing Sirote and Davis Brown into the fold will add another 160 lawyers to Dentons' network of 10,000 attorneys spread across 77 countries. And more combinations will be announced next year, said Dentons global chairman Joe Andrew.

"We're far along with multiple firms, so I think it's very likely we'll have announcements in the first and second quarters," Andrew said.

The firm's Golden Spike plan borrows its name from the railroad tie that united the Central Pacific Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad in 1869. Dentons says its goal is to become the first truly national law firm - and the fact that more law firms want to sign on is a sign that the strategy is working, Andrew said.

Dentons has emphasized that there's greater legal spending in many smaller U.S. markets than in entire countries. There's more outside corporate legal spending in Alabama than in the entire country of India, Andrew said.

Sirote's lawyers cover a wide range of practice areas, including banking and finance, bankruptcy and creditor's rights, litigation and tax. The firm promoted one of the first women to partner in the state and was the first major law firm in Alabama to welcome an African American partner to its ranks, according to a press release.

Sirote president Todd Carlisle said his firm had been doing some soul-searching as to what kind of law firm it wanted to look like five years from now.

"For our clients, it gave us breadth and scope we couldn't find in any other option," Carlisle said of the deal with Dentons. "We looked at a number of options, we looked at four or five different ways of thinking about the future, and by the far, the Dentons option was the best way."