Daily Journal Names Covington’s Defense Wins for Meta and Microsoft as Top Verdicts of 2024

LOS ANGELES/SAN FRANCISCO/WASHINGTON— The Daily Journal selected Covington’s successful defense of Meta, in the Social Media Cases, and Microsoft, in the Cousart v. OpenAI LP class action, as two of its Top Verdicts of 2024, recognizing the largest and most significant verdicts in California in 2024.

A Covington team, led by Chris Pistilli and Ashley Simonsen, secured the dismissal, without leave to amend, of four “representative” school district complaints, which will govern the hundreds of school district cases pending against Meta in a JCCP in Los Angeles Superior Court. Covington serves as national lead counsel to Meta in over 2000 personal injury, public nuisance, and state attorney general lawsuits filed across the country. Most of the cases have been centralized in the JCCP or in a federal MDL in N.D. Cal. The Covington team includes Phyllis Jones, Mike Imbroscio, and Paul Schmidt.

A separate Covington team, led by Isaac Chaput and Ashley Simonsen, secured the dismissal of a first-of-its-kind generative AI privacy class action for Microsoft. The putative class action asserted that OpenAI’s training of ChatGPT and other generative AI services using public data from the internet (and Microsoft’s incorporation of that technology into its services) violated the plaintiffs’ privacy and property rights. The Court granted Defendants’ motion to dismiss, and Plaintiffs opted not to amend their complaint in response to the Court’s order. Another judge later cited Judge Chhabria’s decision in dismissing similar claims against Google. The Covington team also included Kate Cahoy and Emily Henn.