Shepard is lead counsel for Fox Television Stations Inc. in a suite of interrelated federal cases in Washington, D.C., Chicago and Los Angeles involving infringement claims against an internet service that distributes copyrighted works. Last year, she and colleague Rick Stone obtained a significant win for the entire broadcast industry when the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a preliminary injunction in favor of Fox and other networks against the defendant, prohibiting it from retransmitting the broadcasters' copyrighted content over the internet. The injunction applies nationwide except within the boundaries of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled against the networks in a similar case. Following the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2014 in American Broadcasting Companies v. Aereo Inc., the defendant amended its answer to assert a different defense under Section 111 of the Copyright Act. Shepard and Fox won summary judgment on this issue in November; the case is on appeal. Fox Television Stations v. FilmOn X, 1:13-cv-0758 (D.D.C., filed May 23, 2013).
"The significance is that we are preserving the right of copyright holders to determine how and where their work is licensed and enables them to monetize their investment and preserve their intellectual property," Shepard said.
In April 2016, she was part of a trial team that won a $940 million jury verdict on behalf of software company Epic Systems Corp. in a trade secret case against Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., an Indian multinational information technology provider. The victory in U.S. District Court in Wisconsin is believed to be the largest of any kind in the state's history and one of the largest trade secret verdicts in U.S. history. "I spent a lot of time in Wisconsin and took a lot of depos in India in that case," Shepard said. Epic Systems Corp. v. Tata Consultancy Services, 3:14-cv-00748 (W.D. Wisc., filed Oct. 31, 2014).
— John Roemer
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