Something similar connects many of the top attorneys representing the artificial intelligence industry in its most consequential battles: their resumes.
The common thread is Durie Tangri. More than 50 attorneys from the defunct Bay Area intellectual property firm are at the center of epic Silicon Valley copyright fights, just more than three years after Morrison Foerster acquired the practice.
Besides working at Morrison, some of the lawyers have gone on to serve as in-house counsel at Alphabet Inc.'s
As a result of that acquisition that closed in 2023, Morrison is defending the biggest names in tech in law suits that could determine how AI is used, how it’s developed, and who ultimately reaps the benefits from it.
Morrison is one of OpenAI’s most frequently used law firms, representing the AI startup valued at $852 billion in a third of its federal litigation—more than any other firm, according to an analysis of Bloomberg Law docket data.
Additionally, Durie Tangri alums made up five of the nearly two dozen attorneys who represented Anthropic in a
Small World
The network shows how lawyers that forge relationships at a small IP boutique can keep their tight connections thriving years after the old firm folds, thanks to the highly specialized work they do.
“Tech copyright is a small world,” said Joseph Gratz, one of the alums at Morrison.
The Durie Tangri alums have benefited from the demand in tech copyright law, said Gratz, who has appeared in court defending OpenAI in almost two dozen federal lawsuits.
“There was this group of people who had thought really hard about this before,” he said. “And it is, therefore, not super surprising that a lot of those people have ended up fulfilling that spike in demand.”
The Durie Tangri acquisition was a case of perfect timing, said Richard Hung, a partner at Morrison who previously led its IP litigation practice. The two firms began acquisition talks in the fall of 2022, around the same time the first generative AI copyright lawsuits started flooding into the courts, he said.
“We had an inkling, I think, that Joe’s joining would help if copyright litigation took off, if AI really took off,” Hung said. “But I don’t think anyone really foresaw AI taking off the way that it did.”
Not all of Durie Tangri’s attorneys are still at Morrison, according to the LinkedIn pages of their alumni. Samuel Zeitlin, Lauren Kapsky, and Lara Rogers, who were associates at the firm, are now in-house attorneys at Google, Meta, and Amazon, respectively. Meanwhile, Allyson Bennett, Galia Amram, and Annie Lee are now in-house at OpenAI.
$1.5 Trillion Exposure
Gratz is one of dozens of attorneys defending the AI industry against accusations that large language models infringe copyrights on a massive scale. In just one of his cases, plaintiffs allege 10 million distinct instances of infringement.
If courts rule all of these instances infringe and were willful, damages could reach a mind-boggling $1.5 trillion, according to a
The $1.5 trillion is an extreme and probably unlikely figure, but the case Anthropic settled last year for $1.5 billion gives a sense of how costly the matters could be, said Tamlin Bason, an analyst who authored the Bloomberg Intelligence report.
Anthropic faced a potentially catastrophic amount of damages, even for a company valued as highly as it was at the time. But a judge ruled that most of its use of content scraped from the internet is protected by the “fair use” doctrine, Bason said. The company’s settlement followed this ruling and was meant to resolve the remaining illegal-download claims that the judge said weren’t fair use, he said.
“Even though Anthropic felt like it won on that existential piece, which is that training on internet content was fair use, they still had to pay the largest copyright settlement in history,” Bason said. “It really is a sink-or-swim on this slippery fair use argument.”
Birth of a Firm
Gratz’s background put him in the ideal position to be at the forefront of the spike in tech copyright cases. A computer hobbyist throughout his life, he majored in English and theater in undergrad. The intersection of technology and copyright, and how these two affect what types of cultural works get made, are what motivated him to go to law school and what’s been driving his career ever since, he said.
He started working at Keker, Van Nest & Peters, an IP litigation firm that’s also currently representing many of the biggest names in tech. It was there he met a group of lawyers who would eventually leave Keker to found Durie Tangri in 2009.
Durie Tangri’s business model fit in perfectly within the startup culture of Silicon Valley, where clients wanted lawyers with niche expertise who could operate efficiently rather than attorneys from prestigious, high billing firms, said Mark Lemley, a former lawyer at the boutique who now teaches at Stanford Law School.
“We absolutely lost clients early on because we didn’t purport to charge enough,” Lemley said. Durie Tangri was “not just going to throw an endless number of lawyers at the problem.”
One of the marquee cases Durie Tangri took on was the decade-long copyright infringement suit over Google’s book digitization. Sonal Mehta, a Durie Tangri alum who is now at WilmerHale, said the boutique relished taking on matters that ventured into uncharted territory.
“We weren’t afraid to be operating in gray areas or to be looking at where the law hadn’t fully developed,” Mehta said. “We didn’t need to feel like every argument had to be something that was a cookie cutter argument that had already been made and won 20 times before.”
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