Catherine Porto represents clients in all facets of commercial litigation, including trial experience in copyright, patent, and trade-secrets disputes. Prior to joining Keker, Van Nest & Peters, Catherine served as a law clerk to Judge Christopher Cooper of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and Judge Albert Diaz of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Catherine earned her J.D. from Stanford Law School and her B.A. in liberal studies cum laude from the University of Notre Dame. During law school, she served as a full-time clinic student in Stanford's Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, taught criminal law to incarcerated youth as a participant in Stanford’s StreetLaw Pro Bono project, and worked with Professors Pam Karlan and Joseph Bankman on Stanford Legal, a monthly legal news podcast. She previously served as a law clerk representing indigent defendants with Orleans Public Defenders, as a general litigation extern at the ACLU of Northern California, and as a paralegal with the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Appellate Section.
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 and outputs of Open AI's large language models infringe their works.
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 nominal damages to Synopsys, a fraction of what it was seeking at trial.
We represented software innovator SRS Acquiom in a trade-secrets misappropriation case against PNC Bank and two former SRS employees, alleging that the employees improperly retained SRS confidential information and used it, with PNC, to unfairly compete against SRS for online M&A payments-and-escrow business.
We are defending Google in a five-patent case brought by Wildseed Mobile in the Northern District of California that accused multiple Google products ranging from YouTube to Google Workspace applications of infringement. We successfully transferred the case, originally filed in Texas, to California and then invalidated three patents on Section 101 grounds. The two remaining patents were subject to complete or partial invalidation at the PTAB.
We defended SaaS CRM company Freshworks in a trade secret misappropriation lawsuit brought by rival Zoho in the Northern District of California. We successfully narrowed the case with an early motion to dismiss, and, after eighteen months of intensive litigation, negotiated a settlement that cleared the way for Freshworks to become a publicly traded company.
The Daily Journal has named Keker, Van Nest & Peters's trial win for Real Intent among the 2024 Top Verdicts in California. Read more
Keker, Van Nest & Peters partners Bob Van Nest, Sharif Jacob, Sophie Hood and Ryan Wong reflect on the firm’s biggest trial wins which earned its place among Law360’s 2024 Trials Groups of the Year. Read more
A Keker trial team, led by Bob Van Nest, successfully defended Real Intent, Inc. in a San Jose federal court, achieving a favorable outcome in a complex breach of contract case. After securing a decisive copyright fair use ruling in August 2024, they convinced the jury to award only nominal damages, far less than the claimant’s demands. Read more
Keker, Van Nest & Peters team – Laurie Carr Mims, Ben Rothstein, Candice Mai Khanh Nguyen, Melissa Cornell, and Catherine Porto – were featured by AmLaw for successfully securing a significant victory for their client InterMune against the company’s former CEO W. Scott Harkonen. Read more
Katie Lynn Joyce and Catherine Porto discuss ways to build a strong trade secret damages model with Reuters Legal News. Read more