The Recorder named Christa Anderson as one of the Top 50 Women Leaders in Tech Law. Winners were chosen for their ability to handle game-changing, law-shaping, market moving work in the technology sector.
Ms. Anderson is one of the few women to have successfully handled high-stakes jury trials for top technology corporations, including Google, Intel and Broadcom. As one of the lead attorneys for each of the following cases, she supervised all of the day-to-day management, handled critical technical witnesses and experts, and helped the jury understand complex technology.
Oracle America, Inc. v. Google Inc.: We represented Google in a high-stakes patent and copyright war brought by Oracle with billions of dollars at stake. Oracle, which bought the Java programming language by acquiring Sun Microsystems in January 2010, alleged that Google’s Android mobile technology infringed Oracle's Java patents and copyrights. An expert for Oracle estimated Google owed Oracle up to $6 billion in damages for infringement. Our team defended Google against all the patent and copyright claims, and also argued that the damage estimates were wildly inflated. Following repeated rounds of motions and briefing, the judge dismissed the bulk of Oracle’s copyright claims, and at trial the jury rendered a unanimous verdict rejecting all claims of patent infringement. Although the jury decided that Google infringed an Oracle copyright on nine out of millions of lines of source code, the case is considered a sweeping victory for Google, with zero damages.
Suffolk Technologies LLC v. AOL Inc. and Google Inc.: A Virginia federal judge granted our motion for summary judgment on all but one of Suffolk’s patent infringement claims, and issued a Daubert ruling striking the plaintiff’s expert damages opinion in its entirety. Soon after, Suffolk stipulated to invalidity on the last remaining claim. Suffolk had claimed that Google’s Adsense advertising placement technology, which selectively places paid advertisements for a company’s product or service on the Web page of another, used a similar protocol to the one under patent with Suffolk.
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation v. Semiconductor Company: We represented a leading semiconductor company in a patent trial brought in the Eastern District of Texas. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) asserted patent infringement claims against more than a dozen of the world's leading technology companies, including our client. CSIRO contended the defendants' Wi-Fi products infringed on CSIRO's patent, and sought nine to ten figure royalty payments. A week into the jury trial, we reached a favorable settlement with CSIRO, and the remaining parties also settled favorably.