Louis A. Karasik, 53

Intellectual property

Karasik served as lead counsel in a lengthy battle that pitted his client, 20th Century Fox Film Corp., against Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. over rights to the super hero epic, "Watchmen." His team successfully represented Fox in its claim for copyright infringement of the distribution and production rights for the graphic novel. Karasik said he was amazed at the level of public scrutiny of that case over the Internet. He said a lot of people were learning about copyright law by watching the case. Karasik also successfully represented DIRECTV Group Inc. in 2008 in connection with claims by competitor EchoStar Technology Inc. against DIRECTV's conditional access provider, NDS Group Ltd., alleging NDS pirated EchoStar code, released it on the Internet and caused EchoStar more than $100 million in damages.