Sasha G. Rao

Rao is chair of Maynard Cooper’s nationwide IP practice, which includes lawyers in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Huntsville, Ala., and Birmingham, Ala. She handles patent litigation matters and provides legal and business advice to technology clients such as Airbnb Inc., Square Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Chime and A3 by Airbus SE.

She is known as an expert in artificial intelligence, autonomy and robotic systems.

“I like companies that are pushing the boundaries of science and doing something truly novel,” said Rao, who has an undergraduate physics degree.

Among those innovators is San Francisco-based Casetext Inc., a platform that uses artificial intelligence for online legal research.

Rao met Casetext founder and CEO Jake Heller when both were lawyers at Robes & Gray LLP.

“At first, legal research was just done in books. Then electronic keyword searches came along. A big advance was natural language searching,” Rao said. “At Ropes & Gray, I was a partner in Palo Alto and Jake was an associate in Boston. We worked on a lawsuit together and we used to discuss how searching usually led to too much irrelevant data.”

“He’d tell me he was sick of the state of legal research and somebody ought to do something about it,” she continued. “I told him maybe you should be the one.

“Unbeknownst to me, Jake had an entrepreneurial streak and found a way to use AI to help with searches,” Rao added. “You can drag and drop your complaint in your search query, and the software uses machine learning to bring you highly relevant material. It saves an enormous amount of time.”

Heller recruited Rao to be Casetext’s outside counsel.

“We’d never met in person until he got out here to California. I’d always wanted a service like his, and I decided to invest in the company,” Rao said. “They’re a typical software startup in the sense that people try to copy what they do.”

Also, Rao is lead counsel for HP, a defendant in a patent infringement lawsuit filed by a Taiwanese optical lens maker that alleges the lenses used in various webcams in HP laptops infringe its patents. Largan Precision Co. Ltd. v. Ability Opto-Electronics Technology Co. Ltd., 20-CV06607 (N.D. Cal., filed Sept. 21, 2020).

The case is in its early stages. Rao succeeded in having it transferred to the Northern District from Texas, where it was originally filed.

“It’s an advantage to have the litigation in my client’s home forum,” she said.

Rao remains enthusiastic about the future of flying cars following her experience as outside counsel to A3 by Airbus, which made the now-discontinued Vahana, a self-piloted vertical take-off and landing passenger carrying aircraft.

“Now we’re seeing other companies in the field with independently-developed systems,” she said. “Vahana showed the technology is feasible.”

— John Roemer