Experience
Data Analytics Industry Experience
- Analyze and respond to cease and desist letter regarding data mining of information from primary information aggregator.
- Analyze and respond to cease and desist letter addressing aggregation of online reviews using automated software crawlers.
- Risk analysis regarding data aggregation for purposes of training machine learning algorithms in connection with acquisition transaction.
- Risk analysis regarding scraping by HR Analytics start-up in connection with venture capital investment.
- Risk analysis of U.S. anti-hacking and copyright law ramifications for acquisition of European AI company.
- Risk mitigation strategies for transportation analytics client experiencing hyper-growth.
- Analyze and mitigate risk related to scraping of competitor’s website.
- Mitigate risk related to aggregation of consumer credit information.
- Create specialty cyber insurance product to be offered by cloud provider’s captive insurer.
- Draft and negotiate cyber warranty and backing insurance policy to protect cybersecurity company’s corporate customers.
- Create specialty technology errors & omissions liability coverage to back-up fraud guarantee protection offered by crowdfunding platform.
- Negotiate numerous cyber and technology errors & omissions liability policies for wide variety of technology and non-technology companies ranging in size from start-ups to members of the Fortune 5.
BladeRoom v. Facebook and Emerson
After a five-week jury trial before the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, our team won for UK-based BladeRoom a $30 million verdict against global manufacturing giant Emerson for willful and malicious misappropriation of trade secrets and breach of a non-disclosure agreement relating to BladeRoom’s revolutionary new methodology for constructing warehouse-sized data centers. The Daily Journal named this one of the “Top Verdicts” in California in 2018. The Court subsequently awarded BladeRoom an additional $30 million in exemplary damages and $17 million in prejudgment interest, for a total judgement exceeding $77 million. Our client settled with Facebook after the first week of trial.
hiQ Labs Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp.
Represented startup hiQ Labs Inc. in a precedent-setting litigation for data analytics, mining, and aggregator companies and their right to access publicly available data under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), and a California state law on unauthorized computer access. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed hiQ’s preliminary injunction against LinkedIn.
Purple Leaf v. Google, Inc.
Defended Google Checkout in the Eastern District of Texas against assertions that it infringed a patent owned by Purple Leaf that purportedly disclosed a way to conduct an online transaction directly between merchant and buyer. After initial pleadings, we were able to attain a dismissal of the claims against Google.
Viacom International, Inc. et al. v. YouTube, inc. et al.
We filed an amicus brief on behalf of several national consumer groups asking the Second Circuit to affirm the district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of YouTube and Google against the plaintiffs’ claims of copyright infringement based on the DMCA “safe harbors.”