Morgan Chu

Morgan Chu is chair of the litigation practice group at Irell & Manella LLP. The magna cum laude Harvard Law School graduate, who has been with the firm for 47 years, is considered a gifted intellectual property attorney who has secured precedent-setting verdicts and settlements in actual payments totaling more than $9 billion.

At present, he’s enthusiastically engaged with the advent of artificial intelligence and its implications for clients. “We are working with clients in many areas,” he said. “Health care is heavily using AI now. Examples include recognizing cancerous tumors and minimizing false negatives. Humans are fallible. So is AI. Together, humans and AI will do a better job for patients, and AI will get smarter as its errors are corrected by humans.”

Chu said he has looked on, fascinated, over the years ever since AI programs in IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer took on and eventually defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov in the 1990s. “I’ve been watching this for a long time. I don’t think AI is going to take over. What with quantum computing coming into view, we’re at the dawn of multiple thresholds of new progress for mankind.”

Another oncoming area is cardiovascular applications, he said. “From existing technology, doctors fail to recognize problems — or they order procedures that are expensive — to determine whether a patient has or will have a blockage in an artery. AI now is being used to do a less expensive, less invasive diagnosis. Patients are happier, health care costs decrease, and problems are more likely to be identified early.”

So far, clients are consulting about the legal implications of these advanced technologies, but so far nothing has gotten to court, Chu said, adding, “In the future, there will be litigation over use of these AI in these and other areas.”

Meanwhile, he is co-leading the Irell team representing SNMP Research Inc. and a subsidiary in copyright infringement and breach of contract litigation over primary source code. His client sued an array of tech company defendants, alleging they unlawfully copied and reproduced SNMP’s copyrighted code — a proprietary implementation of a computer protocol that is foundational to modern networks. SNMP Research Inc. et al. v. Broadcom Inc. et al., 3:20-cv-00451 (E.D. Tenn., filed Oct. 26, 2020).

Broadcom and co-defendant Brocade Communications Systems LLC have settled the matter on confidential terms. A trial of the remaining defendant, Extreme Networks Inc., is set for October.

“Many companies were using these copyrighted materials until they got caught,” Chu said. His client is seeking disgorgement of revenues believed to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

“Cases like this put people on notice,” Chu said.

—John Roemer