Keker, Van Nest & Peters partners Erin Meyer and Michelle Ybarra have been named among the 2026 Top Women Lawyers in California by The Daily Journal. Meyer was recognized for her work in commercial litigation while Ybarra was recognized for her work in intellectual property. Read their profiles below.
Top Women Lawyers 2026: Erin Meyer
Erin Meyer has spent nearly 17 years in litigation, the last 14 at Keker, Van Nest & Peters LLP, where she has built a practice around preparing complex cases for trial.
Her appetite for trial work traces back to her first year at Yale Law School. "I knew I wanted to be a trial lawyer since my 1L year at Yale Law School, when I stood up in court for the first time representing an elderly woman in a foreclosure case through a Community Legal Services clinic," Meyer said. "Advocating for a client, telling their story and doing my best to achieve their goals resonated with me in a way that no other professional endeavor has."
At Keker, she found a firm that matched that instinct. Meyer has never been siloed into a single practice area, instead moving across industries and legal questions with a consistent objective: positioning clients for success at trial. "The guiding principle of my practice is that no matter the facts, if you develop trial themes that are compelling and persuasive to a jury early on, you will set your client up for success — whether that's through an early favorable settlement, summary judgment, or ultimately a trial win," Meyer said.
Two recent trials illustrate the range. In 2023, Meyer took first chair in a seven-week bench trial defending Sutter Health against a qui tam action under the Insurance Frauds Prevention Act. State of California ex. rel. Duncan and Hulbert v. Sutter Health et al., RG17846895 (Alameda Super. Ct., filed Jan. 25, 2017). Relators sought over $500 million, claiming Sutter committed insurance fraud through anesthesia and recovery room billing. "My team and I had to quickly develop expertise in anesthesia, hospital operations, and the mechanics of negotiations between hospitals and health insurers," Meyer said. "We then had to distill that knowledge, and all of the evidence, to explain why Sutter should win on the facts and the law — and we were successful on all counts." In June 2024, Judge Stephen Kaus ruled in Sutter's favor on all counts.
In fall 2024, she served as lead trial counsel for a Fortune 500 networking company facing fraud and breach-of-warranty claims tied to a 2017 equipment purchase involving SD-WAN technology. "I am so proud of the team I put together in a short amount of time (we were hired seven months before trial), and of our ability to translate complicated technical concepts into a cohesive narrative the jury understood," Meyer said. The jury returned a complete defense verdict, rejecting nine-figure compensatory damages and additional punitive damages. In summer 2025, the court issued an eight-figure fees and costs award to Meyer's client.
Some of her most significant work in 2025 has been pro bono. After filing habeas petitions that secured the release of two unlawfully detained asylum seekers, Meyer joined attorneys from the ACLU of Northern California and Centro Legal de la Raza to file a class action challenging ICE's practice of re-detaining individuals without legal basis. In December 2025, the court certified the class and stayed the policy. "Defending the rule of law, and the most vulnerable in our community who are being targeted by the government, is something all lawyers should be stepping up to do," Meyer said.
For a PDF version of this article, click here.
Top Women Lawyers 2026: Michelle Ybarra
Michelle Ybarra traces her path to the law back to her grandparents, farmers who never finished high school and knew lawyers only from television.
"From my earliest childhood days, I remember them telling me I should be a lawyer because I always had a sassy retort," she said. That early encouragement pointed her toward litigation, and nearly 18 years into her career, Ybarra is a partner whose practice sits at the intersection of IP law and the technologies reshaping it.
Her interest in IP took hold at the University of Chicago Law School, where debates over emerging technologies raised questions about whether existing legal doctrine could keep pace or whether new frameworks were required. Those conversations shaped how she approaches her work today: as a problem of translation as much as law. "My job is not just to understand the technology, but translate it into clear arguments the courts and a jury can engage with — in other words, effective storytelling," Ybarra said.
That skill has been tested across a range of consequential matters. One recent case involved representing Shanghai Moonton Technology, a Chinese video game developer, in a copyright and trademark suit brought by Riot Games over League of Legends. "Rather than proceeding through costly and protracted merits litigation in the United States, we moved to dismiss on forum non conveniens grounds, arguing that the dispute should be litigated in China, where related proceedings involving Riot's parent company, Tencent, were already pending." The court agreed and dismissed the case. Riot Games, Inc. v. Shanghai Moonton Technology Co. Ltd., 2:22-cv-3107 (C.D. Cal., filed May 9, 2022).
In patent litigation, Ybarra led the defense of Instacart against four patents targeting core aspects of the platform. The district court stayed the case pending inter partes review; in February 2024, the PTAB invalidated all challenged claims, and the Federal Circuit affirmed in 2026. Every asserted claim was canceled. (Consumeron, LLC v. Maplebear Inc. d/b/a Instacart, 21-1147 (D. Del., filed Aug. 6, 2021).
The matter that has come to define this period of her career is the ongoing copyright MDL against OpenAI. In re: OpenAI Copyright Infringement Litigation, 25-MD-3143 (S.D.N.Y., filed April 11, 2025).
"The cases raise fundamental questions about how existing legal frameworks apply to foundational model training, transformative use, and one of the most consequential technologies of our time," Ybarra said. She has played a leadership role in the litigation for two years, developing arguments at a scale that requires coordination across numerous related actions and a demanding briefing schedule.
The broader challenge her practice reflects is one she sees across the California IP landscape. "In California especially, where many of the world's leading technology companies and content creators are based, those tensions are particularly acute," Ybarra said.
She added that litigation remains a tool for rights holders, but slow and expensive — and rights holders are navigating a mix of litigation and evolving business strategies while the law develops in parallel.
For a PDF version of this article, click here.
Reprinted with permission from The Daily Journal. ©2026 Daily Journal Corporation. All rights reserved. Reprinted by ReprintPros 949-702-5390.
