REED SMITH LLP: Two Reed Smith partners named among California’s “Top Women Lawyers” for 2021

Reed Smith LLP issued the following announcement on May 20.

Two of Reed Smith’s partners have been named to the Daily Journal’s annual list of the “Top Women Lawyers” in California for 2021:

• Janet H. Kwuon (Los Angeles), who serves as co-chair of Reed Smith’s 800+-lawyer Global Commercial Disputes group, and
• Christine M. Morgan (San Francisco), an intellectual property and complex commercial trial lawyer.

For its special “Top Women 2021” issue, The Daily Journal spoke with Kwuon about her commitment to diversity and mentoring young lawyers, highlighting how she was the first diverse U.S. woman elected to Reed Smith’s Executive Committee, and how she is a founding member of the firm’s Women’s Health Products Group and its Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Council.

The Daily Journal also profiled Kwuon’s success in high-stakes litigation for such clients as the University of California, Eli Lilly, AbbVie, and Endo Pharmaceuticals. The Daily Journal highlighted her skillful defense of UCLA in a major medical device case in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Morgan is likewise highlighted in the special edition as one of the country’s top lawyers for invalidating patents at the pleading stage by way of the Alice defense. Based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision 2014 in Alice Corp. v CLS Bank International, Alice is a powerful tool for patent litigators such as Morgan with its two-part test on the patentability of software patents.

The Daily Journal spoke with Morgan about the “secret sauce” in making Alice motions work, and how she has “helped her clients avoid expensive litigation by ending lawsuits quickly and efficiently—ensuring that technology companies remain free to innovate without getting tied up in court.”

The Daily Journal also profiled Morgan’s recent victory for General Electric in beating back novel claims brought by the University of Florida that it had sovereign immunity from patent challenges as a government entity. The ruling in the Federal Circuit was significant to the industry. As the Daily Journal explained, “A contrary decision would have allowed such institutions to foreclose eligibility challenges.”

Original source can be found here.