Elon Musk’s xAI, sued for the 1st time for copyright infringement for its training of its models, has enlisted a legal team from Sullivan & Cromwell.
What’s notable is that xAI’s legal team includes Supreme Court litigators, even though the case is just starting in the trial court.
Jeffrey B Wall: “Jeff Wall heads the Firm’s Supreme Court and Appellate Practice and is a former Acting Solicitor General of the United States. Named “Appellate Attorney of the Year” by The National Law Journal in 2025, he has argued more than 30 cases in the Supreme Court in areas including securities, class actions, arbitration, intellectual property, taxation, labor and employment, bankruptcy, preemption, the False Claims Act, separation of powers, the First Amendment, religious liberty, and criminal law and procedure.”
Yaira Dubin: “She joined the Firm from the Office of the Solicitor General in the Department of Justice, where she argued six cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and briefed more than 100 others, spanning diverse areas of federal law such as copyright, bankruptcy, tax, labor and employment, federal contracting, the First Amendment, and jurisdiction.”
The Sullivan & Cromwell team representing xAI includes:
This inclusion of Supreme Court ligitators is not unusual, at least not given the novel issues of law raised by the AI copyright litigation. Meta hired Kannon Shanumugam to argue its summary judgment motion (which it won in part). OpenAI hired Lisa Blatt to brief a district court appeal of an evidentiary ruling on waiver of attorney-client privilege. NVIDIA hired Neal Katyal for its trial court defense team.
Incidentally, the plaintiffs are represented by lawyers from Stris & Maher, which also does Supreme Court litigation including by its co-founder Peter Stris: “Peter was one of just 20 private-sector attorneys to argue six or more cases before the U.S. Supreme Court over the period analyzed in a recent empirical study, achieving victories in cases interpreting the Copyright Act, the Securities Exchange Act, and ERISA.”
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