Sonal N. Mehta

As a partner at WilmerHale in Palo Alto, Sonal N. Mehta represents prominent technology and life sciences companies in pathbreaking patent and technology disputes, though she is particularly proud of her ability to prevail on dispositive motions short of trial.

For example, her team defended Aligos Therapeutics against a claim regarding theft of confidential and proprietary information by two former employees of Janssen BioPharma. Entering the case nine months after it was filed in 2022, her team reconfigured the case strategy, enabling her client to reach a beneficial settlement and for the case to be dismissed.

“It was a really interesting case because we were asked to come into the case midstream and help the client devise a case strategy,” she said. “We were able to do that and help the client achieve a very favorable outcome, and it’s something I’m very proud of.”

At the helm of WilmerHale’s team, she has also secured a number of dispositive victories for Meta Platforms (formerly known as Facebook), including the dismissal of antitrust claims, which challenged Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.

When the Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine organization led by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., sued Meta for fact-checking and flagging their vaccine-related posts as containing misleading information, she once again led the team that came to the defense. The case was dismissed by the district court, but is currently pending appeal at the Ninth Circuit.

“It is a very interesting case because it involves First Amendment, Lanham Act and Rico allegations against Facebook’s fact-checking of vaccine-related content on the platform,” she said.

In a somewhat similar case in 2022, former TV journalist John Stossel alleged that Meta defamed him by inserting fact-checking labels on videos he posted about climate change, but a WilmerHale team led by Mehta procured a full dismissal with prejudice.

“There’s a really broad range of different substantive areas that come up when we’re dealing with technology companies and so much of modern life, which is online, and there’s obviously so many different issues that come to play,” she said. “What you could probably see from my submission is the breadth of different substantive areas of the law that I’ve been able to work on as a result of working in both the technology and the life sciences spaces.”

—Kathryn Stelmach Artuso