Kalpana Srinivasan

As Susman Godfrey LLP’s co-managing partner and member of the executive committee, Kalpana Srinivasan helps direct the course of a 140-lawyer firm with offices in Los Angeles, Houston, New York and Seattle.

As a prominent member of the technology law bar and a former wire service reporter, she’s a Daily Journal CLAY Award winner who went from the AP to IP. She received her JD with distinction from Stanford Law School and got her bar card in 1998.

“We as a firm have had only five managing partners in 40 years, and we’re looking to the future,” said Srinivasan, who was elected in 2020 as Susman Godfrey’s first female managing partner following the death of founder Stephen D. Susman. Co-managing partner Vineet Bhatia of the Houston office was elected in January 2022.

“We have a very developed firm culture and we continue to be very busy with cool, interesting cases,” Srinivasan said.

Among them is her position as lead counsel for Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms Inc. in its suit against a Hong Kong-based company it accuses of illicitly scraping account profiles from its sites—including the profiles of 100 million Instagram, TikTok and YouTube users—and illegally selling the data. Meta Platforms Inc. v. Social Data Trading Ltd., 3:21-cv-09807 (N.D. Cal., filed Dec. 20, 2021).

Meta Platforms said it notified the defendant of its violations and blocked access to its socialdata.hk site in early 2021, only to learn that it anonymously registered a replacement website IQdata. social and continued to sell what it termed “demographics” and “insights” about “influencers and their audiences.”

In an unusual twist, Srinivasan’s complaint for Meta alleges that by circumventing Facebook’s block on access to its sites, the defendant engaged in illegal hacking under California law.

The litigation is in its early stages with a joint case management statement due July 8. “This suit is about ensuring and protecting the information on Meta’s platforms,” Srinivasan said.

In another major case, she sued Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. on behalf of Atlas Global Technologies LLC, alleging infringement of Atlas’ patents used for a new generation of Wi-Fi devices. Atlas Global Technologies LLC v. Samsung Electronic Co. Ltd. and Samsung Electronics America Inc., 2:21-cv- 00304 (E.D. Texas, filed Aug. 9, 2021).

The patents at issue were invented and developed by engineers at Newracom, a South Korean government-funded research institution, which assigned them to current owner Atlas in early 2021, the complaint says.

Srinivasan’s August complaint was so successful that even before filing an answer to the complaint, Samsung in November announced in court documents that it had executed an agreement to obtain a license to the patents in question, settling the matter.

– John Roemer