Kanika D. Corley

Although Corley is a litigator, she takes pride in providing her clients’ full-service legal work. Those clients are primarily in the sports, media, technology and entertainment industries, giving her a wide-ranging practice focused on intellectual property issues.

Being a full-service attorney became important to Corley when she was an insurance-defense litigator at a different firm. “I could see how these cases were impacting [the clients’] everyday business issues, and how certain decisions could have been made that would have shifted potential liability,” she said.

So in 2015, she took advanced classes in business law to be able to better counsel her clients. That’s paid off since she joined Akerman in 2018, she said.

“I had to pivot and start working with clients directly and courting them.” She learns about clients’ businesses and their needs and helps them with their intellectual property and other business issues, she said. “I just kind of fell into it, and it’s a lot of fun.”

Fun matters include advising the Houston Dynamo professional soccer team on music copyright, social media and other intellectual property issues.

She was part of a team that won an injunction last November preventing a Cyprus-based company from enforcing in California a foreign injunction involving video games against a Brazilian company. Zithromia Limited v. Gazeus Negocios de Internet S.A., 3:17-cv-06475 (C.D. Cal, filed Nov. 7, 2017).

Currently, she is litigating a case about the ownership of the gearbox from an original Ferrari 250 GTO. Her client, a dealer in classic and high-end cars, had paid $44 million for the extremely rare sports car, but he never received the gearbox.

“Of course you need the gearbox in order to make the car go,” Corley said. “So that’s the nature of the lawsuit: ‘Give me the gearbox.’”

Her counterparts in the United Kingdom won a related action there, leaving the California case still pending. Fisken v. Canepa Group, 18CV01689 (Santa Cruz Cnty. Super.Ct, filed June 12, 2018).

— Don DeBenedictis