Ben Berkowitz

We defeated a class action lawsuit against Google, in which a putative nationwide class of restaurants alleged that Google’s food ordering products violated the Lanham Act and constituted counterfeiting. When granting our motion to dismiss, the court strongly implied that it would consider sanctioning the plaintiffs’ lawyers who had brought the case, identifying them by name in the court’s order. Plaintiffs thereafter dismissed their case with prejudice in exchange for an agreement that Google would not seek sanctions or fees.

We successfully defended Google in two putative class action lawsuits filed in the Northern District of California asserting privacy, contract, and consumer law claims regarding Google’s alleged data collection practices related to Android smartphones. After we successfully moved the court to compel the first case to arbitration, the case was filed a second time with different named plaintiffs. We moved to dismiss the second case and secured a complete dismissal with prejudice of all claims in the lawsuit. The Ninth Circuit affirmed our trial court win.

We are defending Google in consolidated cases on behalf of a worldwide putative class of mobile device users that are challenging Google’s location-data practices. We obtained a dismissal at the pleading stage of all of plaintiffs’ claims, including a dismissal with prejudice of plaintiffs’ claims for violation of the California Invasion of Privacy Act. Following dismissal with prejudice of what plaintiffs viewed as their most valuable claim, the case subsequently reached a settlement, which we are currently defending on appeal at the Ninth Circuit against objectors’ counsel.

We successfully defended Twitter and X Corp. in a series of civil lawsuits in federal courts in San Francisco and New York filed by Saudi Arabian political dissidents and journalists related to rogue Twitter employees who improperly accessed account information while acting as covert operatives for the Saudi Arabian government. Plaintiffs brought Racketeering, Alien Tort Statute, Stored Communications Act, Unfair Competition Law, invasion of privacy, intentional & negligent misrepresentation, concealment, and negligent supervision claims, attempting to hold Twitter as liable for its rogue employees’ actions. We obtained dismissals with prejudice in each of these cases.

We successfully represented Google in an arbitration against former employees Anthony Levandowski and Lior Ron, obtaining a ruling that they breached their duties and employment agreements in connection with their founding of a competing self-driving car business while working at Google. Their competing business, Otto, was sold to Uber for a reported price of $680 million. Following a two-week arbitration hearing, a three-judge panel awarded Google a $179 million judgment that was later confirmed by the San Francisco Superior Court.

We won a complete defense judgment in favor of McKesson after a month-long trial of a qui tam action alleging violations of the False Claims Act and Anti-Kickback Statue. The trial victory allowed McKesson to avoid paying nearly $1 billion in fines, and to avoid the collateral penalties that government agencies can impose on companies found to have paid illegal kickbacks. The Justice Department’s complaint charged McKesson with paying kickbacks to a nursing home operator in the form of underpriced services, and with submitting “legally false claims” to the government. After we had the whistleblower dismissed, a key victory, we then won dismissal of related claims that the nursing home’s supplier subsidiary failed to comply with Medicare supplier standards. With the case’s scope significantly narrowed, we lead our client through a bench trial which featured 24 witnesses, hundreds of exhibits and post-trial briefing. The judge ruled in our client’s favor, vindicating McKesson and its employees. This victory was listed by the National Law Journal as one of the year's five most significant trial wins.

We won summary judgment of non-infringement for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Ltd. and its subsidiary TSMC, North America in a long-running patent lawsuit brought by North Carolina semiconductor company, Ziptronix, Inc. Ziptronix had asserted nine patents and more than 500 patent claims directed to TSMC’s manufacturing of semiconductors for use in backside-illumination image sensors used predominantly in smartphone cameras. On behalf of TSMC, we defeated Ziptronix’s claims by arguing that the territorial limits of U.S. patent law prohibited reaching TSMC’s business transactions and manufacturing operations in Taiwan.

On behalf of Instacart, we have successfully defended against numerous class and collective actions across the country alleging that that shoppers who use Instacart’s technology platform should be classified as employees rather than independent contractors. We have won a number of early dispositive motions in these cases, including motions to compel individual arbitration and to enforce class and collective action bars.

We won summary judgment for a major international law firm in a multi-million-dollar fee dispute and professional liability action arising from its work on a federal fraud case. We successfully defended our victory on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

We defended Coinbase in a putative class action alleging insider trading and violations of the Commodities Exchange Act and Business & Professions Code Section 17200 in connection with the launch of a new digital currency, Bitcoin Cash. We filed a successful motion to dismiss all but one of the plaintiffs’ claims with prejudice, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a trial court order denying a motion to compel arbitration of the sole remaining claim in the case and requiring the plaintiffs to individually arbitrate that claim. Following the Ninth Circuit reversal, the plaintiffs agreed to dismiss all their claims with prejudice.

We won summary judgment for a chain of luxury health clubs, which faced a class action alleging age discrimination based upon discounted pricing for the clubs’ younger members. After winning at the trial court, we then successfully defended our victory on appeal to the California Court of Appeal. In affirming the trial court’s order, the Court of Appeal held that our clients’ pricing model was not only non-discriminatory, but in fact was supported by public policy.

In classic David vs. Goliath litigation, we defended the founders of a digital currency startup against allegations of intellectual property theft brought by a large, international company. The litigation spanned multiple jurisdictions and involved conflicts between U.S. and foreign law. After we won an early strategic motion bringing a full stop to the plaintiffs’ California litigation, and after we filed counterclaims on behalf of our clients against the original plaintiffs in a new action in Delaware Chancery Court, the multi-jurisdiction litigation reached a confidential settlement. The company our clients founded has now raised more than $40 million in venture capital funding.

We represented GoFundMe in trademark litigation brought by Fundme.com in federal district court in Utah. In pursuing an aggressive defense of GoFundMe’s trademark rights, we filed an early motion for summary judgment asking the federal court to cancel and invalidate the plaintiff’s competing registered mark. Shortly after our motion for summary judgment was filed, the case reached a confidential settlement.

We represented an individual in a shareholder dispute between former partners of an Internet startup that was acquired by a multinational corporation. We reached a confidential settlement before significant sums were spent on litigation, and before a single deposition was taken.

A criminal grand jury investigated our client, a financial services company, for money transfers in the Southwest border region. We reached a settlement with four state attorneys general that included establishing a multi-state alliance to combat illegal activity along the U.S.-Mexico border.

We represented a bank’s former CEO in a fraud and breach of fiduciary duty case against his former employer. We won two separate petitions before the California court of appeal and ultimately reached a confidential settlement.