Jan Little

A nationally respected white-collar criminal defense attorney, Little also represents executives and corporations in high-risk, complex civil litigation.

Recently, she successfully wrapped up six years of tangled, multi-state litigation against billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. "It was a long slog," she said.

Khosla, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc., had invested heavily in a clean-energy biofuels startup called KiOR Inc. that failed. Investors, including the state of Mississippi, sued the company, Khosla and other insiders. Hood ex rel State of Mississippi v Cannon, 1:15-cv-17, (Hinds Circ. Ct., filed Jan. 13, 2015).

Little had gotten all claims against Khosla dismissed with prejudice from a similar lawsuit in Texas in 2016.

But Mississippi's lawsuit went through five versions of the complaint and three trips to the state Supreme Court before it settled in a daylong, virtual mediation in January.

Little said the mediation went amazingly well. "We had lawyers from Massachusetts, California, Mississippi, Texas, all over the country," as well as 17 defendants, she said.

She is generally pleased about how well virtual gatherings have gone this year. Little said she appeared for court hearings in Delaware and Mississippi and argued important motions in Texas and California, as well as client meetings across the country.

Virtual hearings in a large antitrust case have gone well, too. A Florida appellate court affirmed Little's victory in the case last year, and now she is seeking attorneys' fees and costs. Weisman v. Southern Glazer's Wine & Spirits, 4D17-3734, (Fla. App. 4th Dist., May 13, 2020).

"You just put in your pleadings, had your arguments, and it worked just fine," she said about the fee hearings.

Little also represents high-level clients in a half-dozen criminal investigations she can't discuss. Some of those matters have been more challenging online.

One client interview and conference with a regulatory agency was especially hard. "We couldn't be in the same room with [the client] and couldn't step out and confer," she said.

She also continues to seek federal habeas corpus relief for a death row prisoner. The pandemic has made that more difficult as well. Price v. Davis, 4:93-cv-0277 (N.D. Cal., filed Jan. 25, 1993)

"The sad part is I haven't been able to visit him," Little said. "We've had to just communicate by letters, which slows things down a lot."

-- Don DeBenedictis