General litigation for social media companies requires a broad skill set and offers exciting variation--from privacy to copyright to class action defense to breach of contract.  What does it take to prepare for this type of breadth?

 

More on Kathryn Cahoy and Kanu Song.

 

SPEAKERS

Kanu Song, Wayne Stacy, Kate Cahoy

 

Wayne Stacy  00:01

Welcome, everyone to the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology's Expert Series podcast. I'm Wayne Stacy, the Executive Director for BCLT. And today we're focusing on careers in technology. And in particular, we're talking about the types of legal work needed by social media companies. I'm here with two attorneys from Covington that are both leading experts in what I'm going to leave as the teaser here in helping social media companies, but I'm going to let them explain exactly what that means because the phrase carries a lot of different meaning to a lot of different people. So with us, we have Katherine Cahoy, who specializes in complex commercial litigation, including antitrust privacy, and consumer protection, and Kanu Song who specializes in complex commercial litigation, including class actions and consumer protection. So before we talk about generally what the practice looks like in the social media space, I'd love for the two of you to explain just what your practice looks like day to day in the technology field.

 

Kate Cahoy  01:13

Sure, hi, Wayne, I can go first. This is Kate Cahoy. I am a litigator and I have practiced since since I began in private practice in Silicon Valley. So and with a heavy emphasis on tech companies. So I have kind of created my specialization in class action litigation. But there are lots of different types of class action litigation that are prevalent in, in this area and for tech companies in general and social media companies as well. So I have done, you know, the heavy component of privacy type issues that are privacy class actions, anti trust and other types of consumer class actions, things. For example, claims brought under California's unfair competition law, claiming that you know, a statement was misleading on a website or you know, something related to that.

 

Wayne Stacy  02:16

How about you Kanu?

 

Kanu Song  02:18

So I am like a litigator, I am actually in general commercial litigation, most of the time, I'm a generalist by choice. So, I do all kinds of litigation, but because my practice is based in San Francisco, a lot of my clients do tend to be tech companies, including social media companies. And in that space, the substantive work that I've done has been in intellectual property, privacy, class actions, and contract disputes the classic breach of contract, but also like state law claims that's sort of tail off to that.

 

Wayne Stacy  02:54

So maybe, to broaden out a little bit, you know, when people think about social media companies, class actions, and consumer protection, maybe don't come to mind, at least aren't the first thing that that comes to mind. Can you explain a little bit about what those practices look like, for a tech company or a social media type company?

 

Kate Cahoy  03:17

Sure, so I think, you know, for many companies that are growing or, you know, either now are fairly successful, or getting to that point, I mean, class action litigation is sort of a risk and cost of doing business and, and I for a lot of different companies. So I think it's something that that many companies face in, you know, they're some of th

Privacy and cybersecurity are growing legal areas. What does a typical counseling practice look like? And how can you prepare for it?

 

More on Cynthia Cole & Nick Palmieri.

 

SPEAKERS

Nick Palmieri, Wayne Stacy, Cynthia Cole

 

Wayne Stacy  00:00

Welcome, everyone to Berkeley Center for Law and Technology's Career podcast. This is the Executive Director of BCLT Wayne Stacey. And with us today, we have Cynthia Cole and Nick Palmieri, from the law firm of Baker Botts, two of the experts in the Northern District of California on privacy and cybersecurity law. Here today to tell us a little bit about the practice of privacy and cybersecurity law and what somebody could expect if they enter this field. So Cynthia, Nick, thank you for joining us today. So the the initial question for this is, you hear people talk about privacy and cybersecurity, like, they're one thing, that the term always gets thrown around, you go to law firm websites, they have a privacy and cybersecurity practice. The question I have is, are they the same? Or are they two different practices?

 

Cynthia Cole  01:01

So, I mean, I think it's a good question. It's a good question. And I would say that one of being an expert in one does not necessarily make you an expert in the other two, right. And so those are questions that this is more for a client, but even for, you know, what an A young attorney looking to kind of specialize in either, it's important to sort of understand that there are some, you know, particular questions and things to kind of understand in about the practice itself, that the firm has, right, if you're looking to sort of lean one way or the other, they are different, but they are converging. And I guess I'll maybe start with the differences, which are just roughly, you know, security is more focused on the kind of infosec network infrastructure issues, right patching and updates and encryption and, and those sort of particularities and then privacy is an area that really didn't, frankly, exist in the US. Except as an, you know, as accepted sort of, on the federal, you know, FTC landscape, right. But it didn't really exist a few years ago, until especially not consumer privacy, the way we talk about it today. And so now, what we're seeing is that with GDPR, from the California, you know, the ccpa, the cpra, Virginia, Colorado, and the focus on the focus on privacy and consumer privacy, and then within those statutes, now, we are seeing security mandates in those statutes. Right. And so a lot of that is really what's driving the obligation, the obligation from a privacy perspective, to have the right cyber security protections. Right. And so that's really kind of how that is converging.

 

Wayne Stacy  03:03

Well, Nick, for it for a new lawyer entering the field, do they need to think about specializing in one or the other is they they start their career and then later on learn both?

 

Nick Palmieri  03:16

So from from my experience it, you know, he started out doing, doing quite a bit of both, like Cynthia said, cybersecurity is more focused on the infrastructure side of things. So there's, there's less of a, you know, legal aspect to it, you know, the legal department at an in-house company, or at, you know, law firms themselves will not be in the, in the deep of a cyber incident, you know, we're not behind the scenes, shutting down servers or anything like that. From the cybersecurity point of view, we're really responsible, responsible for, you know, the response of what happens, you know, who are you reporting things to do, we have to

From patents to privacy to export control, innovations in artificial intelligence present attorneys with significant career opportunities.  David and Jenn from Morgan Lewis explain how AI impacts their work and advise on ways students can prepare for future work.

 

More on David Sanker & Jenn Wang.

 

SPEAKERS

David Sanker, Wayne Stacy, Jenn Wang

 

Wayne Stacy  00:00

Welcome, everyone to Berkeley Center for Law and Technology's Career Podcast. I'm Wayne Stacy, the Executive Director for BCLT. And today we have two attorneys from the the law firm of Morgan Lewis, David Sanger and Jenn Wang. And we wanted to talk with him a little bit today about what the the practice of law looks like around artificial intelligence. It is, especially artificial intelligence and patents, and what is a, what is a practitioner do for day to day? And what does it practice gonna look like over the next decade? So, David, I'll start with you. You know, tell us a little bit about your background and what your legal practice looks like.

 

David Sanker  00:48

Oh, thank you. Yeah. So fortunately, I was able to go to Berkeley Law a few years ago. And while I was at Berkeley Law, I was a summer associate at Morgan Lewis. And I started my work, thinking that I was going to focus on patent litigation. And I did mostly patent litigation. But I also did quite a bit of patent prosecution. Sort of an ancillary basis. And then, so I saw a lot of familiarity with with the patent litigation side, as well as the patent prosecution side. And after about four years that I've been doing exclusively, patent prosecution work. Prior to law school, I actually did software development for 12 years. So I have a lot of background in software. And that has been very, very helpful. Most people don't have that much background before they go into patent law. So that's, that's, that's my, my background and how about Jenn, why don't you say a little bit about what you do.

 

Jenn Wang  01:55

Yeah. So I work with David Sanger, together on patent prosecution. So we do a lot of software hardware, different kind of technology or patent applications and do prosecution. But my background comes from technical background comes from undergraduate in finance and a graduate degree in electrical engineering, then I also worked in our technology company for three and a half years. Then I come to law school, and I'm working in a law company together at the same time. So I'm in the part time in Santa Clara. It's not Berkeley, but it's close neighbor. Then after graduation, I start to practice full time on patent prosecution. It has been like six years, so kind of close to your law school students. So I may have a lot of experience in terms of early career development to share with you. So that's my background. Thank you.

 

Wayne Stacy  03:00

So one of the things I heard when I was at the PTO you talk with with new companies, and they would inevitably say, well, we read on the internet, that software isn't patentable. So we didn't worry about software patents. And, you know, the first time I heard it, I thought it was an anomaly. Oh, here's a company that didn't didn't talk to anybody. But then we started looking across the country between all the regional directors, and it came up over and over again. And so we started looking, and you can find a lot of information on the web that says, you know, software's basically not patentable. And then if it's not patentable, that means there's no real career path in it. For people looking to do software patent work, what do you have to say to that?