Zachary M. Briers

LOS ANGELES - Zachary M. Briers strives to be a full-service lawyer for his clients. For the last decade, he has worked on patent and technology-related litigation for a number of major clients, including Google and YouTube. But over the last year especially, his practice has expanded to advising and counseling them on complex transactions.

"When my clients call... I have made it a priority to be their go-to lawyer for both their disputes and their transactions," Briers said. After all, he said, businesses and their general counsel are never concerned with only one or the other, and lawyers needn't be either.

"I think it's unfortunate that our industry has largely broken down to lawyers defining themselves as deal lawyers or litigators because almost all of our clients are dealing with both issues."

He began expanding the scope of his practice by taking on the issues in some of his firm's transactions concerning high-value technology assets. By December, he was the lead technology transactions counsel on a pair of billion-dollar deals for important clients.

One deal was the sale of Weta Digital's visual effects software and technology to Unity Software, an entertainment software developer, for $1.625 billion. Weta is "Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson's enterprise. Its studio handled effects for those films as well as "Avatar" and others. Munger Tolles represented a major shareholder, Sean Parker.

An unusual feature of the deal was that Weta retained a license to its software so it could continue its work. And because Weta is in New Zealand and Unity in the U.S., "there were some very complicated tax issues that had to be worked out," Briers said.

The second major transaction was Intel's sale of its NAND memory chip and solid-state drive businesses to South Korea's SK Hynix for $9 billion. Because Micron still has an interest in the chip business, the transaction had to be bifurcated, with the drive portion closing in December and the chip portion set to close in March 2025. Briers said he designed the deal's structure. "We had to look at each specific asset and structure the way it could be transferred, which was this really complex exercise."

Even with such deals, Briers said litigation is still his principal work. Early last month, he settled a putative class action in which content moderators claim they suffered psychological trauma from reviewing sensitive videos for his client, YouTube. While Facebook moderators in a similar lawsuit settled for about $52 million, this case resolved for less than $4 million plus workplace modifications, he said. Doe v. YouTube Inc., 4:20-cv-07493 (C.D. Cal., filed Oct. 24, 2020). He also represented YouTube and parent Google in litigation, accusing them of infringing five patents concerning video compression software, or codecs. He and his team defeated each patent on separate grounds through motions, negotiations and PTAB litigation. Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC v. Google LLC, 2:18-cv- 03629 (C.D. Cal., filed July 23, 2019).

Briers also was the lead lawyer in a case accusing Google Sheets of infringing patents on software describing three-dimensional spreadsheets. He won a summary judgment motion ending the lawsuit, which the Federal Circuit affirmed last year. Data Engine Technologies LLC v. Google LLC, 2021-1050 (Fed. Circ, decided Aug. 26, 2021).

The two sides of his practice complement one another. "Knowing the litigation side makes me a better deal lawyer," Briers said.