Reid Mullen

OpenAI tapped Keker as lead trial counsel in a series of copyright lawsuits that will establish the boundaries of copyright fair use as applied to generative AI. The cases include claims brought by newspapers, authors, and other media outlets alleging that the training of Open AI's large language models infringe their works.

We represented Google in what Oracle claimed to be a multi-billion-dollar patent and copyright war concerning the use of the Java programming language in Google’s Android platform. When Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, it acquired Sun’s rights to Java. In August 2010, Oracle sued Google, claiming its Android mobile technology infringed Oracle patents and copyrights. We 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. After an appeal by Oracle, the case returned to district court for a trial on fair use. After a two-week trial, the federal jury unanimously found that Google’s use of Oracle’s Java programming language in the Android operating system was a fair use. In March 2018, the Federal Circuit reversed the district court, rejected the jury’s verdict, and held that Google’s use was not a fair use as a matter of law. In a sweeping victory for Google and our trial team, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Federal Circuit and ruled that Google’s use of the programming language in its Android operating system is fair use.

We defended EDA company Real Intent at trial in San Jose federal court against Synopsys’s copyright infringement claims related to the design and verification of integrated circuits. Synopsys also alleged that Real Intent breached several contractual agreements between the two companies by copying certain commands from Synopsys's software. The KVP team won a sweeping fair use victory on the copyright infringement claims at summary judgment, while the contract claim remained in the case at trial. The jury awarded Synopsys a tiny fraction of the millions of dollars Synopsys sought, and the Court further reduced the verdict post-trial.

We won a rare judgment as a matter of law fending off a $450 million trade secret claim against Veeva Systems in New York federal court. Competitor Medidata Solutions sued Veeva alleging that several of its former employees had access to the company’s trade secrets, retained Medidata’s confidential documents, and used that information to unfairly compete with Medidata when they left to join Veeva. We convinced the court that Medidata’s “trade secrets” were vague business concepts at best, that Veeva never used Medidata trade secrets in developing its software, and that no reasonable jury could find in its favor. The Court granted judgment as a matter of law for Veeva at the end of Medidata’s case-in-chief.

We defended Google in a nine-patent case involving audio signal processing software brought by Jawbone in the Western District of Texas. After obtaining a Markman order that disposed of four of the nine patents, we successfully appealed the denial of Google's transfer motion to the Northern District of California. Shortly after the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the case transferred in a published decision, a favorable settlement was reached.

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.

A Delaware federal judge granted our motion for summary judgment, freeing our client Google from this patent case. Google and Microsoft filed a declaratory judgment action against GeoTag in Delaware. GeoTag counterclaimed for patent infringement, and sought significant damages. We convinced the court that Google's advertising system does not infringe GeoTag’s patent, and no jury trial was necessary. After winning judgment on the merits, we successfully opposed numerous challenges to subject matter jurisdiction made by GeoTag, and protected our summary judgment victory.

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.

We defended Netflix and several of its senior executives from a high-profile defamation and blacklisting lawsuit. The plaintiff departed Netflix for Amazon, and later claimed that Netflix retaliated against him by making defamatory statements about him, wrongfully accusing him of taking confidential information, and inducing Amazon to fire him. We filed an early special motion to strike plaintiff’s complaint against the Netflix defendants pursuant to California’s anti-SLAPP statute, explaining why the plaintiff’s claims against the Netflix defendants were entirely premised on protected and privileged speech and did not establish a viable claim. The court granted our anti-SLAPP motion in its entirety, dismissing all of the plaintiff’s claims against the Netflix defendants only 5 ½ months after the complaint was filed.

In this pro bono habeas corpus case we won freedom for Ronald Ross, an innocent man who had been wrongfully convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to life in prison in 2006. Over the course of a four-year investigation, we, along with our co-counsel at the Northern California Innocence Project, uncovered trial-witness recantations and other newly discovered evidence that conclusively established Mr. Ross’s innocence. We presented this evidence at a three-day evidentiary hearing in Alameda County Superior Court, and we eventually convinced the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office to join in our request that Mr. Ross’s conviction be vacated. The Court granted Mr. Ross’s habeas petition and the District Attorney dismissed the underlying charges. After spending almost seven years in prison for a crime he did not commit, Mr. Ross was freed. We also represented Mr. Ross in post-habeas proceedings, winning him significant compensation from the State of California for his wrongful conviction and incarceration.