EBP 2018
Sonali D. Maitra
Partner, Durie Tangri
Sonali acts as lead trial counsel for some of the world’s leading technology companies and has developed expertise in a number of very different legal fields. Sonali has extensive experience with patent, trademark, copyright, trade secret, class action, video game, and privacy litigation. Some notable examples:
Sonali is lead counsel for Kiloo, defending a putative privacy class action now pending in the Northern District of California. Sonali also advises companies such as Amazon on privacy issues and compliance.
As lead counsel for Google and Waze Inc., Sonali won dismissal with prejudice in the high-profile copyright action brought by PhantomALERT. After winning two successive motions to dismiss, and following the close of discovery, Sonali successfully convinced PhantomALERT to voluntarily dismiss the case.
Last year, Sonali was lead trial counsel for DTS, Inc. a company which licenses audio decoding technology to a number of companies. DTS sought unpaid royalties and damages for copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and trade secret misappropriation. The case settled favorably this year.
In 2015, Segan LLC sued Sonali’s client Zynga for patent infringement, arguing that many of Zynga’s popular games, including Farmville and Zynga Poker, infringed Segan’s patent. After defeating all of Segan’s claims on summary judgment, Sonali secured an award of over $1 million in fees for the client. In addition, the Court held that Segan’s attorneys themselves were responsible for $100,000 of that award, praising Sonali and her team: “And the requested fee amount of $1,188,773.93 is reasonable. Indeed, it is on the low side for a case like this, particularly considering the high quality of the representation Zynga received.”
Sonali also makes pro bono work an important part of her practice. In 2018, the California Court of Appeal ruled in People v. Douglas that where a party strikes a prospective juror for an invidious reason, the fact that the party may have also had other, legitimate reasons for the strike is no cure—adopting the rule advocated by an amicus brief Sonali and Raghav Krishnapriyan wrote and submitted on behalf of amici curiæ Equality California, Lambda Legal, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights.
Sonali has been named one of the top 10 intellectual property attorneys under the age of 40 in the nation by Law360, one of the Top Women Lawyers in California by the Daily Journal, one of the Top Women in Tech Law by The Recorder, and ranked by IAM Patent 1000 as one of the top patent litigation practitioners in the country. She has been named a Future Litigation Star by Benchmark Litigation, a SuperLawyers Rising Star 2012-2017, and was shortlisted for Women in Business Law’s Rising Star. Her other notable clients have included Amazon, Gamefly, Six Waves, LOLApps, and Peak Games. This fall, Sonali is teaching Video Game Law at Stanford Law School.
After law school, Sonali clerked for Judge Sidney Thomas on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
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