Alston & Bird Kicked Off California Copyright Case Over Conflict

Alston & Bird LLP has been sidelined in a copyright spat between the owner of the My Perfect Resume website, Bold Limited, and rival site operator Rocket Resume Inc.

Lawyers in the firm’s intellectual property practice group had been representing Rocket, which is defending against Bold’s claims it copied from the My Perform Resume site in a suit in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. But that representation ended as Judge Beth Labson Freeman disqualified the firm due to its prior representation of Bold in IP matters over a four-year period from 2013 to 2017.

Five current Alston & Bird partners “had a sufficiently direct relationship with Bold such that the Court may presume that these attorneys obtained confidential information,” Freeman wrote in an order docketed Tuesday granting Bold’s motion to disqualify the firm.

Freeman also found that one of the prior Bold matters in which Alston & Bird represented the company was sufficiently similar to the current copyright case to require disqualification.

Rocket had argued the current litigation was about a Bold database registered with the US Copyright Office in late 2020, more than five years after Alston & Bird lawyers ceased doing work for Bold. The company urged Freeman not to bar two Alston & Bird attorneys, Chaka Patterson and Dana Zottola, who hadn’t been staffed on any of the older Bold matters.

Zottola hasn’t made an appearance in the case but Rocket said she’s worked as an adviser to the company. She’s also married to Stephen Zimmerman, Rocket’s founder and CEO and a co-defendant in the case, according to the court’s order.

Freeman said work Alston & Bird attorneys did in 2014 to enforce a Bold copyright was sufficiently similar to the current case to support Bold’s motion to disqualify.

“The overlap of factual and legal issues between the prior and current representations indicates that information about Bold’s copyright registration and enforcement practices and its IP portfolio are material to the evaluation, prosecution, settlement, or accomplishment in this case,” Freeman wrote.

She said it was of no consequence that the firm claimed not to have retained any of Bold’s confidential information. That assertion was unsupported and even if true would make no difference, she said, since under California law courts must presume that an attorney and former client exchanged confidential info.

Latham & Watkins LLP is representing Bold. Rocket is represented by Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP.

The case is Bold Ltd. v. Rocket Resume, Inc., N.D. Cal., 5:22-cv-1045, granting mot. to disqualify 2/13/24.