Meta is adding Kannon K. Shanmugam and William T. Marks, Supreme Court litigators from Paul Weiss, to its defense team in the Kadrey book authors’ copyright lawsuit filed against Meta.
Paul Weiss says: Kannon Shanmugan “has argued 39 cases before the Supreme Court, including 31 cases in private practice. He has also argued over 150 appeals in courts across the country, including all 13 federal courts of appeals and numerous state courts. In addition to chairing the firm’s Supreme Court and Appellate Litigation Practice, Kannon serves as chair of the Washington office and co-chair of the Litigation Department.
“Will [Marks] has particular expertise representing parties before the U.S. Supreme Court. He has represented parties in 15 argued cases, successfully petitioning for certiorari in 10 of them. To date, Will has served as a principal author on over 75 briefs at the Court.”
Already representing Meta are Bobby A. Ghajar and Kathleen R. Hartnett of Cooley, as well as other Cooley attorneys, and Angela Dunning of Clearly Gottlieb.
Where the stakes in civil lawsuits are very high, it’s common for corporations to enlist Supreme Court specialists during the trial stage, in order to preserve legal arguments and to establish a clear record for potential appeals. (NVIDIA has already hired Neal Katyal, although it’s unclear how, if at all, Katyal’s departure from Hogan Lovells to Millbank LLP will affect the representation.)
The Kadrey plaintiffs are represented by the lead interim counsel David Boies, and other experienced litigators from his firm, including Jesse Panuccio and Maxwell Pritt.
Meta is facing a rash of recent setbacks, including Judge Chhabria’s finding of a prima facie showing that Meta may have engaged in criminal copyright infringement by torrenting of files from the controversial Library Genesis dataset, which includes pirated copies of bookes. Judge Chhabria is set to rule on the potential loss of attorney-client privilege for Meta communications under the crime-fraud exception.