Yar R. Chaikovsky

Yar R. Chaikovsky is a prominent Silicon Valley IP trial lawyer who heads White & Case LLP's global technology intellectual property litigation group and is a member of the firm's global technology industry group.

He moved to White & Case a year ago. The firm recruited him and nine others from Paul Hastings LLP after Chaikovsky had spent eight years there. Five others from Paul Hastings' IP group have since joined Chaikovsky at White & Case.

"A year in, it's been an excellent move," Chaikovsky said. "All our clients were happy to move with us. We have a great global platform here, and that's very helpful to our clients."

Earlier in his career he was head patent counsel at Yahoo!. Chaikovsky got his law degree from UCLA School of Law; he also has a computer science degree from USC. He lectures at Stanford Law School.

In mid-April, Chaikovsky was in Washington, D.C., working on cases at the U.S. International Trade Commission. With the U.S. Capitol not far away, his thoughts turned to Congress' inaction on regulating urgent IP matters. "Our laws are not built for AI," he said, referring especially to the unresolved fair use question as neural networks scrape data from the world's vast store of knowledge. "We need regulation here. But can we really expect politicians to deal with abstract ideas? Good luck."

The global reach of Chaikovsky's own practice is on view in a current major case. In defense of client TikTok Inc. and its Chinese parent ByteDance against copyright infringement and trade secret misappropriation claims by a Chinese tech company, Chaikovsky obtained a rare precedential opinion from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that moved the matter from the Eastern District of Texas to the Northern District of California.

He argued successfully that the Texas court was wrong to retain the case, in part because the California forum is more convenient for parties from Asia. "We mandamused Judge [Alan D.] Albright after he misapplied transfer law," Chaikovsky said. Beijing Meishe Network Technology Co. Ltd. v. TikTok Inc. et al., 6:21-cv-00594 (N.D. Cal., filed May 18, 2021).

Due to the volume of patent infringement cases filed in Texas, the transfer opinion is expected to affect lawyers' forum selection calculus of numerous future cases.

Instead of litigating the claims before Albright in Waco, Texas, Chaikovsky is currently seeking dismissal of some of the claims from Senior U.S. District Judge Susan Y. Illston of San Francisco. "We argued that many of the claims lack merit, and we await her ruling," he said. "We'd never get the case pared down in the Western District of Texas. This is of great benefit to our client."

-- John Roemer