I. Neel Chatterjee, 40

Intellectual property

When he's not getting mentioned as a possible federal judge or involving himself in organizations working for diversity, Chatterjee is best known for his work on behalf of social networking site, Facebook Inc. He recently won a major case for the Palo Alto-based company, persuading a federal judge to enforce a settlement that, unless successfully appealed, resolves the claims of the co-founders to another company that said founder Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea. Chatterjee also represented the company in getting a large default judgment against a man found to have deluged the site with spam messages. Chatterjee also represents a number of other Internet companies.