Big Law IP Strategy and Activism, with Neel Chatterjee

Welcome to Elawvate, the

podcast where trial lawyers,

Ben Gideon and Rahul Ravipudi

talk about the real issues that

come with the fight for justice.

So let's find inspiration in the

wins. Let's learn from the losses.

But most of all,

let's keep learning and getting better

and keep getting back in the ring.

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Hey, it's Ben.

Rahul and I started this podcast because

we love hanging out with fellow trial

lawyers and sharing ideas

that can make us all better.

And both of our firms also regularly

collaborate with other lawyers across the

countries in cases where we can add value.

If you're interested in collaboration or

even if you just have a case or an idea

that you want to bounce

off us or brainstorm,

Rahul and I are going to be hosting

confidential case workshops the first

Wednesday of each month.

So here's how it works.

If you have a case or an idea that you

want to talk about or brainstorm with us,

just send me an email to ben@elawvate.net,

E-L-A-W-V-A-T-E. Net,

or go online to elawvate.net and

submit a case workshop request.

We will schedule you for a confidential

30-minute Zoom meeting where we can talk

about your case to see if we can help.

If you feel like there would be good

value in collaborating on the case

further, we can talk about that. If not,

that's okay too.

We enjoy helping other trial

lawyers because we know

someday you'd be willing to

do the same for us if we

needed your help. So again,

if you're interested in

workshopping your case with us,

just send an email to ben@elawvate.net

or fill out a case workshop request

at elawvate.net, and Rahul and I will

look forward to chatting with you soon.

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Welcome to the Elawvate

podcast. I'm Rahul Ravipudi.

And normally I have my

co-host Ben Gideon with me,

but he is unavailable today and we usually

start with some mindless banter and

it would go something like this.

Hey, Rahul, how's it going?

Congrats on the bills continuing

in the playoffs. And I'd say Ben,

I really hope Patriots lose pretty soon

because I'm not rooting for them at all.

And our holidays were amazing. And

let's talk to our amazing guest.

And one of the things Ben and I often

talk about is the inner circle and what an

amazing group of plaintiff trial lawyers

exist there. I want to talk about

another organization.

It's the South Asian Bar Association and

the amazing group of lawyers that are

part of that organization.

And one of them that I had the

privilege of getting to meet,

become friends with, speak on a panel

with is Neel Chatterjee. And Neel,

thank you for joining

us today or joining me.

Yeah, thanks for having me,

Rahul. It's an honor to be here.

No, I mean, the things

that you've done ... Okay,

so here's a couple of fun facts

that I always love to bring up,

and I know you love to bring up because

it's on your business card that you're

the best-looking litigator

and partner on the planet.

Is that the title on your card still?

No, the title on my card, it's close.

I wouldn't be that egotistical, right?

I mean, it's this partner

and very handsome man.

I love that. I love that.

So why don't you first walk us through

your journey. You're a big firm lawyer,

you're an IP litigator and run

the IP practice or co-chair of

it for King and Spalding now,

but walk us through your journey.

And a couple of the questions I have

that I hope you can address are,

how did you continue to

enjoy BigLaw practice?

How did you continue to maintain that

amazing level of confidence that you have

and being at least perceived

as a true extrovert?

And then we'll move on from there.

Yeah, great Rahul. So I am a Silicon

Valley kid and I often tell people this,

my dad literally came to

the United States on a boat.

He came on a boat into the port of San

Francisco and took a cab to Berkeley to

go to graduate school. I grew up here.

I was very involved in public service.

A lot of lawyers did speech and

debate. I did speech and debate.

And in my parents' house,

they have the wall of fame.

And there is one tiny trophy

on there that is the Western

Regional Speech and Debate Tournament

where I came in third place.

And that's the sum total of the Wall of

Fame of my speech and debate experience.

I went to Dartmouth undergrad,

and when I went there,

my dad was very upset because he said

they didn't do real science. And I said,

"Well,

the president of the university created

the computer language basic." And I

don't remember exactly

what his reaction was,

but it was something to the effect of,

"You mean you're trying to be proud

of the fact that your school created

programming for stupid people?

" When I was at Dartmouth,

I ran a radio station.

Dartmouth had a commercial radio station

and we returned money to the university

every year. We were number

one in Northern New England.

It probably meant we had a listenership

of seven people. I did morning DJing.

I was a morning DJ for three years

and I had the number one morning show.

When I was running the radio station,

we got into a legal dispute with

the music royalty companies,

ASCAP and BMI. And we had to hire lawyers.

We had to work with the university or

the college and try and figure out how to

deal with this. And it was

expensive, it was time-consuming.

And I felt like everyone was talking about

these concepts that a dumbass college

kid didn't understand, and I

wasn't given practical advice.

And so I ultimately just kind of made

my own decisions about how to deal with

it. And I got ASCAP and BMI

to walk away from the dispute.

What was the practical advice that

you felt like you were missing?

Well, the practical advice was that

what ASCAP and BMI did at the time,

I don't know if they still do this,

is they would go around to lots

of little storefront owners,

people that were basically living in

their restaurants or their little stores.

And if you had a stereo in the

store, they would come and say,

"You have to pay a music licensing fee

to us for these small business people

that are just trying to make ends

meet." We were a radio station,

so we were commercial, but

we were paying our fees.

What they wanted us to pay for was

when we played Casey Cason's top 10,

you might remember that,

you would get a record and you would

play it and they had advertising on it.

They'd give it to you for free, but

they'd take away your advertising.

So you effectively were

losing money on it,

but people liked it and it was a good

thing to do on Sunday mornings when

students were too hungover to come and

be on radio. And they wanted us to pay a

royalty for Casey Kasem or Westwood

One Radio Network, whatever they were.

And I said, "Did those guys

pay you royalty?" And they

said, "Yeah." And I said,

"Well, why do I have to do it?

Because the only reason these things

exist is to go on the air." And ultimately

the practical advice

was as a media outlet,

we could go public and talk about

what ASCAP and BMI was doing.

They didn't like that. It made them look

really bad. And practical advice is,

okay, the legal advices, there's

all these difficult things,

the concept copyright,

exhaustion, so on and so forth.

Practical advice is call their bluff,

use the currency you

have to negotiate back.

And they walked away from the dispute.

And so when I was dealing with that and

dealing with the number of the issues of

the radio station,

I was kind of confronted with the question

of I couldn't get a job at the time.

It was a pretty tough job

market. I could go to ...

My job opportunities were to be a

morning DJ at some small market or

to continue schooling.

And so I applied to law school and

I got into Vanderbilt Law School.

And I thought at the time that was pretty

cool because I had done this little

foray into copyright stuff and I

was like, oh, it's in Nashville,

center of country music. And so maybe

I could do some copyright stuff there.

I don't know what it was like for you

in law school, but for me in law school,

things changed very quickly from, I

want to do this specific thing to,

I need a job, so I'll just tell people

I want to do everything. Yep. Yep.

And I went to something called

the Southeastern Minority

Job Fair in Atlanta in

my second year of law school.

And I tell people I sent

882 resumes. I got 11 interviews and I

got two job offers. One was in Tupelo,

Mississippi, and one

was in Denver, Colorado.

One was a larger firm, but a

small office that was in Tupelo,

and then the other one was

30-person law firm in Denver.

Which one did.

You pick? Well, so I went to Tupelo

for three weeks. I split my summer.

I went for three weeks.

It was a great experience,

but I don't need to go to Tupelo again.

And then the Denver, Colorado one,

when I went,

they said right when I started that the

firm was going to close at the end of

the summer.

Oh my goodness.

And so we had to, as we all kind of

rely on our two all summer for a job,

that was a real problem. And so I

started looking at, at that time,

I now had a geographical tie to

Colorado, which I did not have before.

Coming to the Bay Area is a

really tough competitive market,

particularly from the East Coast.

And I decided I'm going to apply for

state court clerkships because at the time

they weren't as competitive and I thought

that might be something I could do or

it'd be a little more unusual. And I

was hired by Justice Mary Malarkey,

who at the time was the junior

justice on the court. Ultimately,

she became the chief justice

of the Colorado Supreme Court.

And I worked for her for a year.

The very first case I had to work

on was a case called Evans v. Romer,

which went to the Supreme Court,

and it was about a law that

was basically anti-gay.

So that was kind of a big deal. And

it was pretty much to work on that.

After my year there,

I kind of wanted to come back to the

Bay Area and a judge that I knew her law

clerk had suddenly quit.

And it just happened to be when my

clerkship was ending and she called me and

she said, "Do you want to come and work

for me? " It was a federal magistrate.

Again, those were not as competitive,

although nowadays

they're very competitive.

And so I packed up my truck

and I came back to California.

And the deal she gave to me was,

because I was not a rocket

scientist law student,

you have to commit to work for me for

two years, but if I don't like you,

I can fire you after six months. It

ended up being a great experience.

I clerked for three years,

which is a little unusual.

And what the advantage of working in

San Jose Federal Court at the time was,

was every tech company was in there about

every federal court of legal issues.

So I got a lot of exposure to all

the different areas of practice.

At the same time,

I actually wrote one of the very first

law review articles on copyright for the

internet before Napster,

before any of that.

And as my clerkship was coming to a

close and I had gotten familiar with law

firms, I interviewed a

couple law firms and ORIC,

which was the firm I joined,

in the heat of the dotcom boom,

opened up a Silicon Valley office

for litigation instead of corporate,

which is very counterintuitive.

Most firms were opening corporate

practices and getting gobs of money over

things like pets.com or all these

different kinds of companies. And I was

really lucky because people didn't

really want to be litigated.

They don't want to be corporate. And I

joined Orex office, fledgling office,

but with incredibly good mentors.

That's really how I started doing hardcore

IP litigation, was working with them.

And because it was a small office,

we really got incredibly good experience,

incredibly good experience because it was

a small place where they gave us a lot

of responsibility.

Especially during that time period,

who were some of your clients?

Yeah, so I'll tell one story about

that that was pretty incredible.

So pretty quickly after I joined,

I don't remember the exact year,

we were asked to go down to a

meeting in Campbell, California,

which is in the South Bay of the Bay Area,

a little bit of an unusual place for

tech companies. And we go down there,

we go to the second floor of a building

and half the floor was the tech company,

and then they had a conference room, and

I think they shared it with another ...

It was eBay. And eBay at the

time had one and a half lawyers.

They had a guy who had worked for three

or four years in a law firm and gone in-

house, and then a guy who

was in law school. Wow.

And I remember we were sitting in this

conference room and we're talking to them

about our capabilities

and they're saying, "Yeah,

we got this huge problem because

we have hundreds of thousands of

postings and then it became millions and

then it became tens of millions." And

we just don't know what

people are selling,

but we know people are going to try and

sell everything if this thing really

takes off.

And as we're sitting there,

this guy walks in and he looked

like a Canadian mounting,

like the big brimmed hat or maybe a Boy

Scout, I don't know, one or the other.

And he hands the lawyer this document

and the guy looks around and he's like,

"Someone's trying to sell a duck on eBay.

Do you guys know if we can sell

a duck?" And so at that point in

time, I represented a ton of companies

that were doing all sorts of interesting

internet stuff where today

the rules are well-defined,

but back then nobody really knew

what you could or couldn't do.

I represented eBay when LinkedIn

started, I represented LinkedIn.

When Meta started, Facebook

started, I represented them,

I represented Microsoft on

a lot of significant things.

I did a lot of semiconductor

work for about 15 years.

I was kind of one of the outside core

IP litigation counsel for NVIDIA,

which is a company that's hotter than

anything now. One of my favorite companies

was Logitech. I represented them.

I still represent them

today on certain things.

Are you on a Logitech camera right now?

No, I actually have a Logitech keyboard

and mouse, but I'm using my iPad today.

I represented Apple on a bunch of things,

and so been pretty lucky to be able to

represent some of the coolest technology

companies in the Bay Area.

And so as you were working at Auric

and starting to build that practice,

part of it seems like perfect

timing given the fledgling nature

of all of those companies and then you

building up the Auric IP litigation

practice. How big did you

grow it before you left?

Yeah,

so I think this is kind of interesting

because I really felt like when I joined

Oric, we were kind of, I don't

mean this in a negative way,

we were kind of IP

litigation ambulance chasers.

I don't know how to interpret that in a

positive way, but I'm trying to- Well,

because I'm proud of- I'm just kidding.

Because I'm proud of it.

We would study new complaint reports and

we would literally look for companies

that we'd never heard of because we

thought those were the most likely to hire

us. And we had a couple good clients

like Applied Materials and AMD,

some bigger companies, but pretty

much we were not known at all.

And we went from that that were

maybe not more than a dozen

lawyers that were completely unknown

to when I ran the IP group maybe 12

years later, we were the American

Lawyer IP Litigation Group of the Year.

And we grew nationally. We acquired

a big chunk of a California law firm.

We brought on a lot of

lateral partners in New York.

We built out an appellate

team and it became a very,

very successful group. I

want to say at its peak,

it was probably 125 lawyers,

something like that.

So from your personal vantage point,

how did you evolve from

the scrappy reaching out to

each individual potential party in a

case when lawsuits are filed to then

starting to grow into trying a bunch

of these cases and then growing into

managing 125 lawyers?

How does that even work?

And then how did you evolve?

Yeah, luck is a big piece of it.

One of the great things about

Oric for quite a while was we did

not saddle ourself with process. Even

though I say these to people all the time,

I couldn't get a job out of law school.

I was not a great student

and I wasn't a bad student,

but I wasn't a great student.

I'd never met an Indian

lawyer before I became one.

And I always walk into the

job appreciative of the

opportunity that this gives

us. I think it's a real

privilege to do what we do.

And I really tried to create that ethos

within our group and that we should

appreciate the opportunity to do what

we do and it's okay to be a little bit

scrappy and have your own voice and

to approach things with authenticity.

That was a big law.

That's kind of a unique thing in some

ways. There's plenty of people that I'll

read and write from the same script.

I never knew what that script was,

so I made it up as I went

along. The managing thing was,

it was a little bit difficult because I

was young and there were a lot of people

older than me that the firm was

asking me to manage and not everybody,

but the staying scrappy,

traveling all the time to have

close touchpoints with people and

really spending a lot of time on marketing

and brand development where we would

really probably talk about our

achievements internally and externally.

And Big Law then is very different

than Big Law now because Big Law then

was not a 1500 person law firm.

It was maybe 700. Now you go to

these partner meetings and I mean,

there's so many base you don't recognize.

So give me a couple of other examples

of how Big Law has changed from your

perspective versus how it was.

So I would say that first of all,

the advent of legal operations

with large corporate clients,

they now have entire staffs that are

dedicated towards legal operations that

aren't actually like the lawyers.

Sometimes they are lawyers,

but they're really focused

on the operations. You

even deal with procurement,

which are the companies,

people who buy things that are

like widgets for their company.

There's a lot more formality

on how you run things.

I also think back then when I first

became partner, it was like 2000, 2001,

people would sit around in a room together

a lot and talk about what do we want

to do. At Oric,

we would have a partner meeting once a

month and we'd have dinner and there'd be

an office leader or group

leader or whatever, but then

we would talk as a group,

what do we want to do?

That is much, much smaller,

the ability to do that.

I mean,

law firms are businesses

and Big Laws are more

businesses than they are

professional associations.

Point I made to somebody relatively

recently was, I don't know,

the two biggest law firms in the

country, something on the order of 350,

400 equity partners. Essentially,

that means that the average

equity ownership is 0.3%.

Do people really think a partner there

would have a say in anything that the law

firm's doing at 0.3%

ownership? That's a business.

It's not partnership in the way

that we thought of it before.

And then do you see partnerships at

Big Law now being like each equity

partner is its own mini

firm within the practice?

Is there competitive nature among the

partners or is there still a collaborative

environment among those equity partners?

Yeah, I don't think there's

a universal truth on this.

There's certainly firms where there's

silos and it's basically a bunch of many

firms and a big firm. The

three firms I've worked in,

I did not necessarily

find it that way. In fact,

if you go to a lot of the

Big Law partner meetings,

there's a big emphasis on

collaboration and cross pollination,

across practices because what the

goal of a lot of Big Law is to expand

relationships beyond one particular area.

And that's kind of a necessity because

of the way conflicts work, right?

But there's always ambitious

people who, I mean,

we're all type A's who are all kind of

chasing after some of the same clients

and you have to make sure

you're coordinating to work

hard to make sure people

are being collaborative along the way.

Okay. So I have a question on litigating

from the big firm perspective.

A lot of our listeners are trial

lawyers across the country,

and a lot of our listeners

are plaintiff trial lawyers.

And the practice on a single event

plaintiff case is a little different

than probably the big firm perspective

in working up a case for trial for a host

of reasons,

but I think there's a lot that can be

learned from the big firm practice.

So can you give us an

example of the different

pathways and workflows that

build up to one of your IP

trials and maybe on a real life

example of a fund case you tried?

Yeah. So the buildup is,

there's a saying that I have in IP

disputes is that when I walk into court,

I represent the inventor. It

doesn't matter. And then I'd say,

"What side of the courtroom?"

Because in patent law,

it's a strict liability thing and

it's a very inaccessible thing to lay

people most of the time.

All the legal concepts are things

you might argue about in court,

summary judgment and the like, but the

minute you're walking into a jury trial,

you have to figure out how to

put a story around it. I mean,

I've tried other kinds of

cases that are not IP per se.

There'll be contract disputes or even

environmental cases and corporate fraud

cases. And all of them

kind of operate the same.

You start with this is a case about,

and if you can't state what the case

is about in four or five sentences,

then you got a real problem.

Powerful graphics.

When you're talking about

technical concepts that are really,

really difficult for people to understand,

having really powerful graphics to kind

of explain the key points that you're

trying to put together and

using them throughout the trial.

So people will see it at the

beginning of the trial in an opening,

witnesses will use components

of it during the trial,

and then you'll be able to use a big

chunk of it in closing is important.

I have a memo that I wrote on how to

prepare for trial because in Big Law,

sometimes you have very large teams,

but junior lawyers won't

even know where to sit.

And so just a lot of the practical

things about how do you deal with stuff,

the fact that the jury's

watching you at all times,

that they have nicknames for you.

It's just like what you do, Rahul,

but it's in a slightly different context.

The big evolution point for me

was in patent cases, you will have

these really, really incredible,

we can hire the world's greatest people.

And there were two things about

experts that I've learned that I think

are probably a little different than

what a lot of people deal with in other

contexts.

One of them is I have the opportunity

to hire the best people in the world,

but they may not be the best

witnesses. So even if they have ...

At some point when

someone has credentials,

any more credentials are not

that relevant to a juror.

It's just kind of glossism.

And so having an expert who

is much more people friendly,

much more plain speaking, but has enough

credentials to be credible is really,

really important. I used to

get the world's greatest thing.

Now I go for a person

who is a solid performer,

but is also very accessible to lay people,

charisma. The other evolution was people

have a tendency and IP disputes to

engage in a technical

cross-examination of witnesses.

I will never win a technical

argument with God's gift to

whatever, semiconductor physics.

And so I really believe now that

you go after the low-hanging fruit,

and that leads me to the story.

So I represented this company called

Ruckus Wireless, great company.

They do wireless access points. Basically,

your wifi router has an antenna

in it that picks up your signal.

They had some groundbreaking

antenna-related technology

that let basically Wi-Fi

and your house work faster.

And I was brought into the

case six weeks before trial.

So I was saddled with whatever the sins

of the past were for another lawyer,

and I had to stitch together the case.

And the other side had some

very highly qualified experts,

and they had accused virtually every

product in the company of infringing,

and there was a risk that there would be

an injunction that the company could be

put out. Imagine being the

general counsel and saying,

"I want to get a new lawyer six weeks

before trial on my existential dispute."

And I just had this strong

suspicion about one thing that the

expert did wrong, and the case was about

antennas, that'll be important in that.

And so I'm cross-examining the expert.

I put up the patent claim and I said,

"Okay, let's not worry about all

the technical mumbo jumbo here.

Would you at least agree with

me that to infringe this patent,

you have to have an antenna

in it? " And he says, "Yeah,

you have to have an antenna in it.

That's what we're accusing

of infringement." And I said,

"Did you ever look at the devices

that you're accusing of infringement?"

And he's like, "No, I didn't need

to. " That was the risk I took.

I didn't know whether he had

looked at them or not. He goes,

"Do you ever look at the devices?"

And he says, "No, I didn't need to.

I had all the technical documentation.

I had this, I had that. " He said,

"Oh." And so I unscrewed one of the

access and I handed it to him. I said,

"Can you show the jury where the

antenna is? " And he couldn't do it,

but that's like low-hanging

fruit. I mean, he took the risk.

Oh, that's amazing. So

what if he said, "Yeah,

I had looked at one of them."

How is that going to play out?

Because he had done a garbage

dump of every product we sold,

and there were three products

that didn't have an antenna,

and one of the ones I gave him

was one that didn't. Love it.

Love it. And in that case, the

second one was I had a really,

really difficult inventor.

He was angry about the case.

He had had a hard life before he came in,

and I made him come to trial and

I made him sit through trial.

He'd never worn a suit

before. He's a very tall guy.

He shows up in his three-piece suit.

He has long hair and he slicks it back,

kind of looked like a mafia guy.

And I had to work really hard.

I had to socialize to the jury

that he had had a hard life.

His dad had been killed. He

was a Russian Jewish immigrant,

fled Russia to come here,

and he had got into Stanford,

couldn't go to Stanford because

he had to take care of his mom,

and he may not always be happy to be in

a courtroom. At the end of his direct,

I asked him,

"Are you proud of what you did?" And he

gave this story where he tells his whole

family story, and he says,

"And then to make something that

people actually want to buy and to be

acknowledged by the US government in

the patents that I created," he's like,

"This is the American dream." And you

can see all of these people kind of

tearing up.

And so between the guy who hadn't looked

at the device and my guy telling his

personal story and bringing

humanity into a patent case,

I really don't think anything

about the merits was determinative.

I think it was the narrative.

That's amazing.

That really kind of hits the point of

trying to make points with the jury that

actually resonate as opposed to talking

over their heads and maybe score a

technical point here or there,

but nobody knows you did.

Nobody knows you did. I mean,

I guess that's another evolution point

on the expert side is you always want to

try and get jurors to understand

whatever it is you're talking about,

but I really think the juror's

role is to assess credibility,

not necessarily to understand

things at the PhD level.

And that is really important

because people are good at

assessing credibility. Is

someone squirming in their seat?

Are they kind of just hired?

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Let's talk about a couple of other things.

I just want to really make sure we cover

this because it's really hit me hard

and I was so impressed and really why I

wanted to have you on the podcast, Neel.

So at some point Trump becomes president

and then he issues an executive order

with respect to certain

law firms saying, "Hey,

the government can't contract with these

people, " or things to that effect.

And I know that created a lot of

issues for the big firms and how

they were going to react to it,

and it probably created some disconnect

or conflicts with the partners

within these firms. Then

you created an Oregon ...

Organization because I

think it's incredibly brave.

And I think now as we're talking about

your background and cutting against the

grain and everything that you've done

to be a successful lawyer and building a

successful practice,

it totally is in line with it.

But can you explain to our listeners what

happened and then what

you did and what it means?

Yeah. So when the executive orders

came out against the law firms,

there was also a co-pending thing where

there were a bunch of letters sent to

about 32 law firms about their

diversity and inclusion practices.

And I'm very passionate about

diversity and inclusion.

I've always done a lot of

things. I founded the Bay

Area Diversity Career Fair,

which has now been renamed and

it's been going for 25 years.

It's most successful 2L

job fair in the country.

And there was just a lot of

hand-wringing in law firms.

It was hard to make decisions.

Munger, Tolles and Olson

had written a really outstanding brief

that was going to be an amicus brief in

support of the law firms

that were attacked,

and they tried to get big law to sign up.

I think less than 10% of the

AmLaw 200 firms signed onto that

brief,

and it created a lot of issues. I looked

at it as businesses have to do what

they have to do.

If people need access to government and

they're afraid that they get access to

government and they

don't want to make waves,

they're going to have to decide that.

But there's this awkward thing where

there were partners and associates that

really wanted something

to be said and done,

were kind of holding partners

accountable. Clients were upset about it.

And there was not necessarily

a lot of dialogue because as I

talked to my colleagues,

law firms kind of did what we would

sometimes advise our clients to do,

which is don't talk about stuff,

make some decisions and move forward.

And in a professional

services organization,

that doesn't work as well because people

want to be able to have a conversation

about these things.

And so I decided it was a Sunday

morning during March Madness. I said,

"I want to have a space for people

to be able to talk about this.

" So I created a private LinkedIn

group that was called Law Firm Partners

United. And I just kind of

wrote something. I said,

"Less than 10% have done this.

I'd like to get some people together

and we can just talk about this and then

see if there's something we can

do in our individual capacities,

not in our law firm

capacities." And oh my goodness,

it took off like wildfire. People say

things like you said, Rahul, brave,

all of these things. I just

formed a LinkedIn group

and then people saw value in it.

And within a day we had 125 people

within two days, we had 250,

and today we have almost 900. And

within two weeks, so I was like,

okay,

now I have all these people joined.

People were talking about how do we talk

internally?

How do we raise these issues in the

firm seeking mentorship and the like.

But I felt this enormous sense

of responsibility to the group

because so many people had joined,

it got all this press and stuff.

So I went on there, I said,

"Is anyone a nonprofit lawyer here?" And

five of the people in our group raised

their hands. And I got them

together on a phone call and I said,

"What is this? Is it a 501? What

is it? " And they said, "Well,

we ultimately concluded we are

a professional association,

kind of like American Bar Association."

Okay, great. And within two weeks,

we had formed an entity,

appointed a board, hired pro bono,

written a brief.

We had town hall meetings among all of

the members who wanted to participate,

and we filed our first brief

two weeks after we found it.

And what was that first brief?

I think it was in the Sussman Godfrey

case, but it was an amicus brief.

And we've now done five of

them. We've done five of them.

We'll do more on the appellate

side. And I have to say,

one of the most inspiring things I've

done in my career were those town hall

meetings because basically

we had a brief drafted,

it was all privileged and I got people

together and we just said, "Okay,

we're going to walk through everyone

on the call and just say what you want

about the brief." It was very clear

to me there were very wildly different

political perspectives. There were

corporate lawyers, tax lawyers,

litigators that all had a view.

To hear people respectfully share common

ground where they did not share common

ground on a lot of things was kind of

the way I think America should work.

And it was just so cool to just

facilitate that discussion.

How did you harmonize all of

the different perspectives?

I got to tell you, so we

hired a firm in Denver.

In some ways it's similar to your firm,

Rahul, that the Olson Grimsey firm.

And Eric Olson, who was the Solicitor

General of the state of Colorado,

he was experienced in doing

this because he led the

state's fights against the government

when he was the attorney general.

So he was always building consensus

among different states with different

perspectives for common briefs.

And so he just did an amazing

job on pulling it together.

And it was a non-political brief.

It was just the rule of law

and the constitution are

important and we have some

fundamental issues here that are at stake.

And so that was really awesome to assemble

the team and actually get this thing

rolling. And actually now we have

to, I just got an email today.

I have to file a bunch of

formal nonprofit documents.

So tell us a little bit about the outcomes

of the five briefs and amicus briefs

that you filed so far and

where you see this all going.

Yeah. So the law firms that fought the

executive orders got a clean sweep.

Every single one of them has been,

all the exec orders have

been found unconstitutional.

They're now being appealed. Mark

Zade, who's a pretty well-known guy,

he got his security clearances revoked.

We've also put an amicus brief in

his case, and that case is ongoing.

That one's a little bit different, so

there's not an outcome yet on that.

One. So one of the things

as a plaintiff trial lawyer,

a lot of times we have tort

reform and a lot of different

industries trying to attack

people's access to justice.

And then we see a lot of

different perspectives as

well where there's a lot of

people who, like myself,

who I'm just worried about my clients

and my potential clients and what the

impact of any type of

reform, they call it reform,

but really I see it as oppression and

taking away a Seventh Amendment right to a

jury trial, what the impact is on

the entire justice system. Now,

when these executive orders came out,

obviously there were the law firms and

the way that they reacted and what you

talked about there, but

your 900-person group,

you talked about Ethos in your firm.

What's the ethos of that organization?

It's changing, right? Because

there was this moment in time,

let's say March of last year through

June of last year where people were

very, very active. And now there

are still people who are active,

but it's quieter. People

kind of think, "Okay,

we've kind of got our process in

place." I forgot to mention one thing.

One of the really important things that

I felt like we did is when we filed the

amicus brief, we filed it on

behalf of law firm Partners United,

but we allowed people,

we only had a 12-hour window to

put their names on the brief.

And the first brief, we only had about

110, but the second one, we had 250,

300 people put their name on the briefs.

And that was kind of interesting because

people said that it meant so much to

them to just be able to put their name

on a brief supporting the rule of law.

And after we filed our first brief,

there was another group that was

formed called General Counsels United,

which had lawyers for big companies,

and that group has 800 lawyers on that,

so it's pretty cool. Now let's go back

to your question. I forgot what it was.

Yeah. What's the ethos

of your organization now?

And so what's the mindset on

really protecting the rule of law,

of course,

but what's the reason behind wanting to

protect the rule of law from the big law

perspective?

Yeah, because I mean, we rely on it,

right? We rely on it because Rahul,

like you talk about as a plaintiff's

lawyer that is going to court and wants

access to courts, but a

lot of these law firms,

they're much more corporate

than they are in court lawyers.

And one of the things that

we've talked about is,

should we start public education

around what the rule of law means?

Because that phrase is a very

inaccessible concept to non-lawyers.

And I think about when

we drive down the road,

there are little yellow lines that

divide us from going one direction or the

other, and that keeps us

from killing each other.

And there's some lawyer who developed

that rule about which side of the road we

drive on, how wide the road's going to be,

and how much those little lines have

to be spaced. And that's rule of law,

keeps us from killinging.

In corporate deals or in tax or in

litigation,

if we do not have a system

of rules we can live by,

there's nothing that's enforceable.

There's nothing we can do to

operate in our daily lives.

And so from your perspective,

how did the executive order constitute

a direct attack on the rule of law?

Yeah. Well, basically it

said for who you represent,

we can preclude your access to government.

We can preclude your access

to courthouses. We can

preclude your access to,

even if it's regulatory things

like the FTC or the SEC.

And lawyers have to represent

people sometimes on unpopular

causes. When my kids were younger,

we would talk a lot about why do I

represent prisoners in civil rights cases?

And attacking law firms

for who they represent and

just doing their job,

it just frustrates the goals

and objectives that we have.

The fight isn't over. I mean, it's

not just the attacks on law firms.

There's a new rule in place that puts a

cap on the amount of loans that students

can take to go to law school. I mean,

that's a huge deal because

that cap on the loans,

a lot of people who might come from a

first gen background that can't afford law

school, that want to become

civil rights lawyers,

they need to take those loans to go.

And the reality is that

in the nonprofit world, a lot of

those folks are first gen lawyers.

It's just that it's the

case. By putting the cap,

you're making it harder

for those organizations.

There's a chilling effect or bono laws

that law firms are willing to do. I mean,

it's happening.

And so we still have a lot of things on

the rule of law being frustrated because

people are not as willing to take

on these really important battles.

Yeah. At the very

beginning of this endeavor,

was there a lot of fear of retribution

for even joining your association?

Yes. So I won't name any law firm names,

but I was surprised by the differences

of opinion about how people dealt with

it. So I was just like,

we're just a bunch of people getting

together to talk about stuff.

But there were law firms that

encouraged people to join. They said,

"We can't speak ourselves, but

we strongly encourage you to.

" There were law firms

that said, "You do you.

If you're doing something

in your individual capacity,

we don't care. Go do it.

" There's a way to hide if you're

a member or not on LinkedIn.

There are law firms that searched how

many people in their firm were members and

would tell them they didn't want them

to be part of it. And at times, I mean,

I heard rumors that people's

careers were threatened.

Unreal.

And then what about just fear of

retribution directly from the government?

Were some people just afraid to join and

be put their John Hancock on anything

because they were afraid the government

would directly attack them or their

firm?

Yeah, so that's where my background in

social media was really helpful because

everything we did was

about privacy controls.

If people wanted to be public and they

wanted to put their name on a brief,

they could do that.

But if they just wanted to be in a private

LinkedIn group and be part of roughly

900 people, they could do that too

and not have their identity known.

And they were given

the control to do that.

They could toggle the button in LinkedIn,

they could put their name on a brief or

not. They could join a Zoom call or not.

And they were given the ability to

be as public as they wanted to be.

And when we got all this press, I

didn't want it to be just about me.

So I put together comms team where we

had a whole bunch of our lawyers that

wanted to be public talking about it as

spokespeople for our group. I forgot to

mention that. We also hired

a comms company for free.

They worked for free Vision360 that did

all of our media relations. Fantastic.

And they were terrific.

They were world-class and they dedicated

a lot of people to manage the press and

everything.

How much time do you spend on this aspect?

Right now, I don't feel like I'm

spending as much time as I would like.

I just finished a trial, and so

you know what it's like. I mean,

trial's all consuming. We are now

talking about what else can we do?

And so I actually,

I need to go back to the group and I

have some ideas on things we could do.

And some of the other members have come

up with ideas and we're going to see if

there's some additional things we

can do out there. But right now,

it's not a ton of time. When the next

round of appellate briefs come in,

that's going to be the

more time-consuming piece.

I mean, what amazes me about this is that

really the reality is when you see an

attack, there's a way to

respond. There's fight or flight,

and it's not something where you

get compensated for your time.

It's just doing something because

it's the right thing to do.

And that's what really impresses

me about what you've done, Neel,

and what you've inspired in getting

this organization put together and then

following through on making things happen.

You doing things actually

makes a difference.

And so for all of our

listeners across the country,

if you were to give a parting message

on their extracurricular activities and

the importance of

actually doing something,

even if you're not getting paid for it

just to do it because it's the right

thing, how would you spread that message?

Yeah. So one of our South Asian

lawyer friends, Alamdar Hamdani,

I saw him speak, as it must

have been 15 years ago.

He was asked a question like that because

he was in public service for quite a

while. His opening line in his speech was,

"Do good." It's a privilege for

us to do what we do. Like I said,

I walk into the door every day and I

think I feel lucky to be able to do what I

do.

And everyone is going to have a different

way that they can find meaning and

contribution, but everyone can find that.

And if you can find ways to do

things that are big or small,

and small is not, it

may seem small to you,

but it's not to other people and do

good without expectation of anything in

return.

It rewards you in just enormous ways.

I tell first year lawyers who say, "Well,

what can I do in terms of mentorship? I

don't know anything." And I said, "Well,

for a second-year law student,

you walk with the gods because

you have a job and they don't.

And if you're a first-year law student

and you're talking to a senior in

college,

you walk with the gods because you got

into law school and they haven't yet."

And there's always an opportunity to do

good for just those one or two people

and it'll make an enormous

difference in paying off.

I love it. I love it. Really appreciate

everything you're doing, Neel,

and it's always great to see you. So

thanks for making the time to be on here.

If anybody has questions or

wants to reach out to you,

what's the best way to connect with you?

One of two ways. LinkedIn is always great.

I'm pretty active on social

media and on LinkedIn,

a little bit of a box of chocolates,

you never know what you're going to get,

but there's that. And then you can

always email me at nchatterjee@kslaw.com.

Fantastic. Thank you so

much for joining us, Neely.

I hope you'll come back and I want to

get an update on all the progress you've

made.

Great. Thanks for having me, Rahul.

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