Yar R. Chaikovsky

As a prominent member of Paul Hastings LLP’s intellectual property practice, Yar R. Chaikovsky has a deep background in the field. Until recently, he led the firm’s IP litigation practice as its global co-chair. He earned his undergraduate computer science degree at USC before attending UCLA School of Law. Early in his legal career, he was Yahoo Inc.’s first head patent counsel.

He is a senior fellow of the Litigation Counsel of America, an invitation-only trial lawyer honorary society.

Before practicing law, Chaikovsky was an engineer in the missile systems defense department of Hughes Aircraft Co.

“That Yahoo job now makes me feel a little old, but it brought me to the Bay Area in 1999,” Chaikovsky said.

His family is from Ukraine, and he was glad to report that distant relatives managed to escape the country as the war began and have arrived safely in Colorado. “My father is an engineer who worked at Hughes Aircraft his entire life after fleeing the atrocities of Stalin. He built missiles to shoot at the Soviet Union. He got me involved in the company, working on the coding for [President Ronald] Reagan’s Star Wars offshoot, ‘Brilliant Pebbles,’” a ballistic missile defense system.

Now, Chaikovsky’s work includes a successful defense for Snap Inc. in high stakes litigation filed by BlackBerry Ltd. The plaintiff claimed that Snap—Snapchat’s parent—infringed on six U.S. patents covering areas of its mobile messaging technology related to methods of deploying targeted advertising. BlackBerry Ltd. v. Snap Inc., 2:18-cv-02693 (C.D. Cal., filed April 3, 2018).

BlackBerry alleged that it had invested billions of dollars over the past decade into research and development, including for its patent portfolio. It filed related claims against Facebook Inc., and its Instagram and WhatsApp arms along with Twitter Inc. and Nokia Corp.

Chaikovsky secured summary judgment, invalidating four of the six patents asserted against Snap. BlackBerry stipulated to a dismissal with prejudice of the remaining patents. In December 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed, leaving BlackBerry with zero recovery and sending the message that Snap would not be intimidated, Chaikovsky said, adding that in early 2021 BlackBerry resolved to not continue further litigation against Snap.

“I argued with Heidi Keefe [of Cooley LLP] for Facebook. We split the oral argument time,” Chaikovsky said. “It was one of my better appellate results. BlackBerry was seeking tons of money.”

In a bet-the-company case for a fintech start-up bank, Chaikovsky took over from another firm on defense when the CEO was accused by a prior employer of trade secret misappropriation. Chaikovsky discovered a binding arbitration clause that should have ruled out the suit plus a patent application showing the secrets at issue had been publicly disclosed. The judge threw the case out. East West Bank v. Shanker, 3:20-cv-07364 (N.D. Cal., filed Oct. 20, 2020).

Chaikovsky then won a $400,000 attorney fees motion. “To get rid of the case, we filed a hard-hitting pleading and didn’t even have to argue it in court.”

– John Roemer