Timothy C. Saulsbury

SAN FRANCISCO - Timothy C. Saulsbury is a litigation partner at Durie Tangri LLP. He joined the firm in 2013. He serves as lead counsel for leading tech companies, including Zoom Video Communications, Inc., VMware, Inc., Atlassian Corp. Plc, Pinterest, Inc., Wix.com, Tonal Systems, Inc., Brightcove, Inc. and Gusto.

His interest in the law began in high school in Virginia. "I had a history teacher who had been an in-house counsel at Verizon," Saulsbury said. "He showed me that working in the law was a chance to look at different fact patterns and find a lot of hard problems to solve."

At Stanford Law School, Saulsbury served as co-editor-in-chief of the Stanford Technology Law Review and took several courses from Mark A. Lemley, the director of the school's program in law, science and technology, and a Durie Tangri founding partner.

After graduation, Saulsbury clerked for Kathleen M. O'Malley, both at the district court for the Northern District of Ohio and then at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. "I learned a lot from her," he said. "Now that I have a district court practice, I can anticipate what to do at the trial court level to maximize the record for appeal."

Saulsbury worked as an associate at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP until Lemley phoned and offered him a job at Durie Tangri. "He recruited me," Saulsbury said.

In an $87.2 million patent suit over auto infotainment technology where he represented Aptiv Services US LLC, Saulsbury successfully cross-examined the plaintiff's chief inventor and, in May 2022, got a non-infringement verdict. "I tripped him up by asking him to identify differences in the patents at issue, and he sat for a full three minutes without answering. The jury got the message," Saulsbury said. Microchip Technology Inc. v. Aptiv Services US LLC, 1:17-cv-01194 (D.Del., filed Aug. 24, 2017).

Saulsbury worked with Lemley on two cases in which they successfully challenged rulings by district court judges in Texas, denying transfer of the litigation to other venues. More recently, he is defending software development tool maker Atlassian against claims by a plaintiff software company that asserts it invented foundational elements of the modern internet. Express Mobile Inc. v. Atlassian Corp. Plc, 3:21-cv-08942 (N.D. Cal., transferred Nov. 19, 2021). After arguing claim construction and securing significant defense wins before U.S. District Judge Alan A. Albright in Waco, Texas, Saulsbury teamed with Lemley to file a mandamus petition at the Federal Circuit. The panel ruled that Albright had abused his discretion in denying the case's transfer and sent it to the Northern District of California.

"We contended and the panel agreed that what matters is whether the witnesses located in the venue asserted by the plaintiff are truly relevant to the case," Saulsbury said.