Apalla U. Chopra  

Apalla U. Chopra leads O’Melveny’s colleges and universities practice and co-chairs its firmwide litigation department. Until fairly recently, she also co-chaired its labor and employment practice.

Her practice, not surprisingly, focuses on complex and sensitive matters.

Frequently, the matters entail both litigation and an investigation, Chopra said. “They almost all involve sensitive subject matters that require a delicate hand in how the matter is presented to a court or to the public. Almost all of them include some type of reputational impact.”

It is tackling those sorts of cases and investigations that make her practice fun, she said. “As a kid, I loved puzzles. To this day, I love puzzles, and these types of matters that have the multifaceted representations that push and pull at one another is the ultimate puzzle-solving activity.”

The push-pull is the tension between advising an institution as it cooperates with an investigation into alleged misconduct and tries to address the misconduct internally while at the same time defending litigation against the institution over the same conduct. It’s “a circumstance where you have multiple types of inquiries and litigation going on concurrently,” she said.

She’s worked on many such matters, including leading an internal investigation for the Portland Trail Blazers two years ago and conducting confidential investigations for major universities across the country. One recent example is her work on behalf of San Jose State, where the former head athletic trainer and director of sports medicine was accused — and now faces criminal charges — of sexual misconduct.

Chopra advised the school as it worked with prosecutors and with investigators from the federal Justice Department. She also represented the university in a class action by students alleging they were victims and in a pair of lawsuits brought by athletics officials who claimed they were retaliated against for reporting the problems.

Those two cases settled last year, and the school has filed a demurrer in the class action, Chopra said. O’Brien v. Tuite, 21CV379038 (Sta. Clara Super. Ct. filed March 2, 2021) and Doe v. Trustees of the California State University, 22CV395973 (Sta. Clara Super. Ct., filed March 18, 2022).

In a very different matter, Chopra co-led a team representing a Century 21 unit in litigation over whether real estate salespeople could continue working as independent contractors or must be reclassified as employees. The central issue was whether an exemption included as part of AB 5 applied to the sales folk adequately. In November, she and the team won a published appellate decision upholding contractor status. Whitlach v. Premier Valley Inc., 86 Cal.App.5th 673 (Cal. App. 5th Dist., Nov. 18, 2022).

— Don DeBenedictis