I. Neel Chatterjee

Chatterjee, who moved to Goodwin Procter in February, serves as lead counsel for Anthony Levandowski, the star engineer at the center of a widely publicized dispute between Google Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc. over the intellectual property governing self-driving cars.

The high-profile complex trade secrets and employee mobility case involves Google’s Waymo LLC project and its claims that Levandowski stole 14,000 documents related to driverless vehicle navigation technology, then used them to create his own company and sell it to Uber for $680 million.

Chatterjee represents Levandowski in two arbitrations and represents a separate company, Otto Trucking, in the related federal court case. Waymo LLC v. Uber Technologies Inc., 17-CV00930 (N.D. Cal., filed Feb. 23, 2017).

“We’re going to an arbitration trial next year,” said Chatterjee, who declined further comment on the sensitive case. Separate parts of the sprawling litigation involve patent claims and the potential for criminal action against Levandowski, whom Uber fired in May. “It gets a little complicated,” Chatterjee acknowledged.

It seemed fitting that Chatterjee, the internationally prominent technology litigator, should be in the thick of the Google v. Uber dustup, with billions of dollars and the future of the autonomous car revolution likely at stake. His client list reads like the history of the internet’s legendary upstarts: Microsoft Corp., Facebook Inc., eBay Inc., Oracle Corp. and many others.

Indeed, Chatterjee’s long and storied career started in the heart of Silicon Valley as a law clerk in a San Jose federal courtroom. It was there he met his wife, then a court reporter.

And it appeared in character for Chatterjee to himself inject a note of disruption into his decades-long career by jumping from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP to Goodwin Procter LLP.

,There his current cases concern issues of internet scraping and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for Facebook, a threat against TiVo Inc. linked to its acquisition by Rovi Corp., and trade secrets at a leading technical institution in India that brings into play the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.

“It’s crazy, isn’t it,” Chatterjee said of his move to Goodwin. “Orrick is a great firm and I’m proud of what I did there, but I’m looking for new challenges. This is a significant change for me. Goodwin Procter has a very sizable IP practice nationally, but it is smaller here in the Bay Area. It’s my task with others to build it up by assembling an all-star team.”

— John Roemer