Krista S. Schwartz

Schwartz first encountered intellectual property and patent law while working as an engineer for Bell Labs after her company applied for a number of patents on work she’d completed with desktop videoconferencing.

“I just found it fascinating,” she said of the patent legal work. “And I decided on a lark to take the LSAT.”

Schwartz said she did well enough on the exam to apply for law school, where she enrolled solely with the intent to pursue intellectual property and patent law.

“You have the chance to continually work on new and different technologies,” she said of the practice area. “Instead of being pigeonholed in the same little slice of engineering over a long period of time. ...It’s amazing how you can become an expert in a very narrow focus of technology very quickly.”

Last year, Schwartz obtained a $30.4 million jury verdict on behalf of Synopsys Inc. in the software company’s copyright infringement claim against ATopTech Inc. Synopsys Inc. v. ATopTech Inc., 3:13-cv-02965 (N.D. Cal. March 10, 2016).

The Synopsys case, Schwartz said, was the first to go to trial since the landmark Google v. Oracle case, in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed a district court decision and ruled that application programming interfaces can be copyrighted under certain factual circumstances.

“I think we’re the only plaintiff to date who has been successful following that decision in enforcing a software copyright involving command sets or programing interfaces against a competitor company,” Schwartz said.

“So the Synopsys case is very important in terms of establishing, under this new federal circuit precedent, that indeed it is possible to protect software programing interfaces before a judge and jury,” she added.

For Schwartz, the Synopsys casework also allowed her to spend a significant amount of time in her favorite arena — the courtroom. Early on in her career, Schwartz thought she might pursue patent prosecution, but her first exposure to litigation nearly 20 years ago changed her career path for good.

“The best part of the job is when you get to go to court,” she said. “Trials don’t happen as often as a number of us would like. Trials, hearings, depositions are really some of the most fun aspects of the job because of the intellectual challenge.”

— Shane Nelson