Khurram’s Quorum – Ep 048: Neel Chatterjee on testing assumptions

Khurram’s Quorum – Ep 048: Neel Chatterjee on testing assumptions

Neel Chatterjee is back on the podcast after more than two years, and a lot has changed. He's now at King & Spalding co-leading the technology industry group, he founded Law Firm Partners United (a nonpartisan professional association that grew to more than 850 members through LinkedIn), and he's been quietly rebuilding how he approaches arguments, juries, and the use of AI in high-stakes litigation.

In this conversation, we dig into the recurring theme of this episode: testing assumptions. Neel walks us through using AI as a "lawyer-adjacent" tool to prepare for a California Supreme Court argument, why the creepiness factor is now central to any data-driven case, what he learned about credibility from running mock jury trials with fifth graders, how LFPU came together in a single LinkedIn post, and why he views right now as the best moment in a generation to practice law.

Keep reading below for the full episode and the complete transcript of our conversation.

Top Insights

Below are the highlights of our conversation:

• AI as Lawyer-Adjacent, Not Lawyer-Replacement: Neel used AI to profile how each California Supreme Court justice questions attorneys, and one prompt reshaped his argument: "What is the rule you want us to adopt?" He started his argument that way, framed everything around it, and watched opposing counsel flounder on the same question. AI didn't write the argument. It helped him perform a better version of himself.
• The Puzzle Box Metaphor: Neel tells jurors up front that their real job isn't to become experts in semiconductors or software. It's to assess credibility. His opening and closing show the picture on the box lid. The witnesses are scattered puzzle pieces. That reframe lowers the cognitive burden and aligns with what juries actually do well.
• The Creepiness Factor: In any case touching data, privacy, or modern tech, Neel has learned that the public narrative of surveillance now overwhelms the legal doctrine. Jurors often don't care whether a patent was infringed. They care that a TV is watching them. The winning strategy is to embrace that discomfort and fold it into your narrative, regardless of which side of the v. you're on.
• Fifth Graders Teach Real Trial Lessons: Neel built a mock jury trial program for fifth graders using a real pet-carrier patent case. After listening to 15 cohorts deliberate, he learned that kids (and by extension, juries) reward preparation and punish attorneys who wing it. They also craft credibility stories independent of the substantive law, just like real jurors do.
• Always Look for the Twofer: In a zero-sum game of time, every effort should accomplish more than one objective. Pro bono work that also gives a junior associate their first deposition. Community cleanup that also raises property values and demonstrates leadership. LFPU that simultaneously preserves the rule of law and builds cross-firm relationships. The twofer is the multiplier on a career.

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Full Transcript

Khurram Naik: Neel, welcome back to the podcast. It's been a little more than two years. A lot has changed in law, a lot has changed for you, so it's exciting to have you back here.

Neel Chatterjee: Yeah, thanks, Khurram. It's great to be back. Love your podcast.

Khurram Naik: You were sharing that you used AI in preparing for an argument you gave before the California Supreme Court. I'm interested in what you did there, and more generally, we've been talking about uses of technology in the course of law, technology as a tool to augment what a lawyer does rather than replace. I'm interested in hearing about what you did here in that matter and talking more generally about patterns you've observed in your career and others for embracing technology.

Neel Chatterjee: I'm happy to talk about that. One thing that's happening a lot in the legal industry that people are talking about is how AI will replace lawyer jobs. We'll talk more about that high-level concept in a moment, but I met with a friend of mine who's a former litigator who has now started a legal tech startup called FullProof AI. Her name's Nipun Soorian. Nipun presented to me a concept I hadn't heard about, which was AI can be lawyer-adjacent rather than lawyer-replacement. It was kind of an aha moment for me, that especially when you're doing high-end or complex work where human factors are important, kind of the EQ piece of things, you can actually use AI to help improve your own performance.

Neel Chatterjee: I'll give two examples. The first is the California Supreme Court argument. I had a very significant matter for the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley. I served on the board for 23 years. I'd done pro bono work for them for almost 30. It was a case involving the California Public Records Act, which is similar to the Freedom of Information Act. The die was cast. The briefing was done. We knew generally what our arguments were going to be. But what I didn't really know was how the justices on the court approach argument, and how they approach questioning of attorneys. I went into our internal AI tools and I said, what are the types of questions, not as to a particular subject matter, but what are the types of questions each justice asks? And the response gave me a framework for what is the perspective of each of the judges over a large body of oral arguments that the AI reviewed. I was prepared when a particular judge asked a question for what perspective they were coming from. I could not quite predict the questions they were going to ask, but pretty close, based on this framework of what are the different judges most concerned about in general?

Neel Chatterjee: Probably the most useful thing was the AI said, one justice doesn't always ask this, but frequently asks the question, what is the rule you want us to adopt here? And then we'll use that as a springboard to test the boundaries of that, and different justices will respond by testing the boundaries. It seems obvious, what is the rule you want us to adopt, when you're going to an appellate argument, but it turns out very few people actually argue in that way. It materially changed the way I structured things. I started my argument, and you can listen to it online, saying, the rule we are asking this court to adopt is. And it framed the argument. I could figure out where the different judges were going to ask about the outer boundaries of how that rule could apply. I thought it was a really helpful tool in framing it. My recollection is that the judge asked the other side, what's the rule you want us to adopt, and he floundered around and couldn't really deal with that, and started arguing about the underlying record, which isn't necessarily the best way to deal with an appellate argument.

Neel Chatterjee: Another example I used: I had to give an opening statement in a case last fall, and for a variety of reasons, the preparation was on a very accelerated time frame. Typically when I'm getting ready for trial, I start working up my concepts for an opening about six weeks before trial. It's not like you're working full time, but you're going through an iterative process over time to hone it, get it down to the key issues, get it within the time frames. In this case I only had two and a half weeks. So it was really helpful to use my AI tools to experiment with shortening my opening, prioritizing issues, and helping identify core vulnerabilities. I still developed the theme. I still wrote my opening and created preliminary graphics. But then I used the AI as a tool to figure out where complex concepts may not be accessible, where my graphics weren't quite working. It gave me some assistance, as did the humans on the team, as to where the vulnerabilities were in the way I was presenting things. I was able to take a six-week effort and compress it into about two and a half weeks. I think, just because of the time frame, I probably wasn't quite at the level I would normally want if I had all the time in the world. But it made a hugely helpful contribution on how to improve my own performance.

Neel Chatterjee: The final one I'll talk about: I've had to give some speeches, not legal, not for a client, but more for events. Typically you have a relatively tight time frame. I've used AI to help me find quotes, and then I have to make sure they're not phantom quotes. Sometimes when you have a compressed time frame and you want to convey a lot of concepts, transitions between each concept can be very hard to work out, and it's jarring when you just jump. I used AI to help me figure out strong ways to transition from one point to the next, even though I knew the concepts I wanted to convey. Each of those was lawyer-adjacent. They were performance enhancers, more than replacing anything I would typically do.

Khurram Naik: Let me pick up on what you just said, because it's interesting. In the context of the appellate matter and the opening statement, the conventional thought around appellate argument says there are certain appellate lawyers who are very well known by judges at the Supreme Court, state or federal, repeat players, and they're known for certain things. They have a credibility so that no matter what the argument is, their credibility lends itself to prevailing. Two reactions I have. AI in this context you're describing levels the playing field. What matters less is you mentioned the kinds of EQ, and maybe what we mean by credibility is EQ of knowing how to size up a given justice and how to respond to one of their questions. So that's one interesting aspect. The other is, for yourself, my impression of Neel, a first-chair trial lawyer, is that you've honed a style over time. You've honed a thesis. Last time we talked about some of the principles you use. One core principle in complex technology cases, if it's an IP issue, is to say, we represent the innovator. That's the core of your story. There are techniques you've honed over time. What's interesting is these AI tools aren't wholesale changing who you are, but there are material departures from your process. It's interesting to hear how much AI is essentially changing how people operate at a time when the classic concept of what an experienced trial or appellate lawyer is someone who is known for something. Here you're suggesting AI is a tool for being a little more adaptive and changing more, which seems like a departure from how we practice.

Neel Chatterjee: I'm not sure I would go as quite as far as you're suggesting. I still think there's a huge benefit for people that are specialists in a particular domain and can read the room. One of the reasons I hate Zoom depositions is because you can't read body language. AI can only take you so far on that. AI is going to tell you about the questioning style and things like that. But if the judge is making a face when you're making an argument, it's not going to tell you that. You still have to be able to read the room and know those human factors well enough to be able to read them. There's a place for the specialists with strong capabilities in that area. But you are right at the same time that it does make the playing field a little more level, because it can help us prepare in ways that we couldn't before. Just as an example, in some appellate courts, you don't know which judges you're in front of until the day of the hearing. But you can use AI to keep track of who are all the judges that handled arguments that month to try to isolate who are the most likely candidates to be on your panel. It's enormously helpful when you're preparing. If you're a specialist in those courts, you're going to know all the judges anyway. But these are things that help us improve our performance, and I do think it levels the playing field a little bit.

Khurram Naik: What about this concept of, without AI, you had your intuition about how to approach your arguments, and then AI suggests, you've got this data that you didn't have before, and insights that you didn't have before. You made some changes based on these data tools. You talked about the value of a specialist, but then if you're changing as a result, how do you think about what's the core part of Neel Chatterjee's approach versus what you're willing to change?

Neel Chatterjee: One of the weaknesses of AI is that it always exists to please you, with one exception I can talk about. Generally, if you go to AI and say, what do you think of my argument, what are the weaknesses, it's generally going to tell you you did a great job. It's not necessarily going to push back. Instead, it'll give this diplomatic thing: if you'd like, I can offer suggestions. It's helpful to get those things. I've done a fair number of appellate arguments and jury trials. You do mock juries and you do mock arguments where you get retired judges or whatever to question you. Those are very useful inputs on the way you're structuring your argument. But no single judge or no single mock trial is going to completely change the way you're approaching things. It's going to be more tweaks on the edges, or you might learn in a mock jury trial that people just really hate a particular argument. Each of these are inputs that help you exercise judgment, and I don't view AI as any different than that.

Neel Chatterjee: The example I'll give on a jury exercise: I've done a lot of work involving data rights. People might have noticed that the price of a television has gone down dramatically. You can get, it used to be TVs would cost three or four thousand dollars for the most recent type, and now they're coming out at maybe $1,200 despite inflation. The reason is because your TV is watching you. The way a lot of the TV companies make money is they are delivering served ads to your television through smart functions, and they are monitoring everything you watch. I've handled a lot of patent cases and a lot of other sorts of cases that deal with that issue. One thing I learned from the jury exercises, because I would have a tendency to go on and talk about the legal issues, is, is it infringing a patent, is it not, the name of the game is the claim, all these mantras you learn. What I learned is that people feel creepy about TVs watching you, or about your own computer watching you. That dramatically affects how they feel about anything. They may not care at all about the patent infringement, because they're going to say, I just don't like this technology because it creeps me out. That was a significant learning where I completely changed my approach on data-driven disputes where quasi-privacy rights could be implicated. The creepiness factor has a profound impact on a lot of the tech-driven work we do today.

Khurram Naik: You're saying the creepiness factor probably benefits whoever is on the defense side inside of your office?

Neel Chatterjee: It can hurt the plaintiff too, because if the plaintiff has a patent, the plaintiff can also say, our technology makes sure your data is secure and only used in responsible ways. It may be uncomfortable that this is being done, but it's a reality of our world, but we keep it safe. These defendants, they're not using it in a safe way. They're pirates. They're using your data irresponsibly and without our patent rights, or whatever the rights you're asserting are, you're going to have these irresponsible uses. You're actually embracing the creepiness factor to say it validates your technology. You can do that on both sides. What I've been learning over the past three or four years is that issue, embracing the creepiness of the discomfort around certain new technologies and the public narratives happening, is becoming increasingly important.

Khurram Naik: I want to come back to your idea of using tech to support lawyers and how that's evolved. But since you started talking about how juries react to this, this is becoming a theme on the podcast. I recently interviewed Joe Ahmad of AZA, and something he talked about was framing your arguments to align with the worldview of jurors and the motivations they ascribe. It's not just about honing, there's a level past hopefully you have the facts on your side, hopefully you have the law on your side. There's something past that, which is understanding how juries are going to assign allocation of responsibility and what they think is fair. One example he gave, in his experience, jurors have a hard time believing that corporations don't act with profit as their primary or sole motivation. So they have a hard time understanding other motivations a business might have. They also have a hard time believing that if something important happens, a corporation wouldn't document it. Since you're mentioning that there's not just the nature of the technology but also jurors' reactions to it, I'm curious for you.

Neel's point about juror worldview, the idea that what juries assume about corporate motivation often dominates what they actually deliberate on, echoes what Joe Ahmad described in his episode about preparing trial narratives that meet juries where they already are. Listen to my conversation with Joe Ahmad.

Khurram Naik: I'll also add, Tim Yoo was building on this theme. His theme on approaching juries is being a tour guide. Maybe there are dueling tour guides, and one person is pointing out a bunch of things, and so, you can, you know, the other side told you to look at this tree. Why don't you walk behind the tree? Take a look. Walk behind the tree, look up the tree. Look at the top of the tree. Rather than trying to jam some narrative down their throat, just point out other things they can look at. It's becoming a recurring theme, talking about how jurors respond to ideas. Anything else you want to add?

Neel Chatterjee: There are two things. First, I think there is this bias that everyone buckets every big company the same. All motivations are profit, so it's a negative concept. I've actually tested that issue in certain jurisdictions, and that actually turns out not to be totally true. People will have very strong opinions about particular companies or people. Just as an example, here in the Bay Area, HP has a very storied history, and there was this concept called the HP Way, a very high-ethics, high-values-driven organization, where even when you weren't legally required to do something, you would still do it if it felt like the right thing to do. I thought that died in the 1970s, the 1980s, and then all kinds of things happened with HP, acquisitions, spin-offs. For a variety of reasons, I had occasion to explore how people feel about HP. I wasn't representing HP, I just had occasion to explore it. Even today in the Bay Area, that legacy of how HP behaved gives HP, which is a multi-billion-dollar company that would be subject to all the negative stereotypes, extremely positive feelings about what they did for the Bay Area and the way they approach business. Another company like that is Airbnb. Airbnb's CLO wrote a book called Intentional Integrity about how you lead as a company with integrity. The way they democratized where people can stay and gave people extra access to funds, and the way they monitor and take care of it, overall they had pretty positive feedback. Not all companies are created equal. It's important when you're going into a jurisdiction to understand how people feel about those companies. Sometimes they won't know who they are. You can have multi-billion-dollar companies that nobody's ever heard of.

Neel Chatterjee: The other thing I've learned: I increasingly use this metaphor in cases, because I deal with stuff that's really hard and inaccessible for people to follow. I'll go to jurors and I'll say, my job is kind of like a puzzle box. As a trial lawyer, my opening and my closing are going to show you the cover of the puzzle box. What should the picture look like? What you're going to hear during the trial are all the puzzle pieces in the box that are disassembled, because you're going to hear evidence from witnesses, but it's not going to be in a sequence. It's going to be one witness telling you everything they know, and then the next witness telling you everything they know. You're basically getting this jumble of puzzle pieces. My job is to show you the picture at the beginning, so as you hear the evidence you know where it fits into that larger picture. Then, each side is going to present two totally different pictures of the cover of the box. Your job fundamentally is to assess credibility. It is important you understand the technology or whatever facts we're talking about, but at the end of the day, the reason we have the Seventh Amendment is because there's a belief that people can assess credibility. What's credible, what's not. If someone's shifting around in their chair, can't look you in the eye, people know. Even if they don't understand everything going on, they know whether someone's telling a lie or not, or stretching the truth, taking an aggressive position, or if they're uncomfortable. That EQ is a big part of why our constitutional democracy works. You want to let people know you're going to be talking about technology, you're going to try to educate them, but you want to relieve the stress that causes a little bit, by letting them know their real job is to assess the credibility of the story and see how the puzzle pieces fit together. That's a more evolutionary thought than I used to have. I used to think, I need to be the best teacher of the world for patent cases. The reality is if your expert's testifying for three hours and you're talking about the inner workings of a semiconductor device, you're only going to get so far on teaching a concept.

Khurram Naik: Was there a moment that changed that perspective, framing this as fundamentally about credibility?

Neel Chatterjee: Yes. And it's going to sound ridiculous. A number of years ago, I decided to create a mock jury trial program for fifth graders. Historically, the ABA had something, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and it's all scripted, and Goldilocks is always convicted, and it's kind of dumb. I wrote one on a patent case. It was a patent case involving a pet carrier for a bike, on an actual litigated patent. We had associates basically present infringement and invalidity of the patents. We'd show things like Toto in the Wizard of Oz, where it's in the little basket in the back and jumps out and runs away from the Wicked Witch of the West. To show that to infringe a patent, you have to hit every element of a claim. We showed a little Lego character hitting a strike, cute things like that.

Neel Chatterjee: We would separate the fifth graders to deliberate, and we'd listen in. While jurors are not fifth graders, they behave very similarly. These kids, first of all, thought putting a pet carrier on a bike is a dumb idea. Not all of them, I've done this now probably 15 times, but they often would think putting a pet carrier on a bike is a dumb idea and is unsafe for children. They would either find non-infringement or invalidity because they thought this is just a bad invention. The second thing was that they tended to focus, without knowing it, on which lawyers were better prepared and which weren't, and which things were more credible to them about the way things were being talked about. We had some mock testimony, and the kids would make those assessments.

Neel Chatterjee: Then, this is the most amazing part. If you and I sit around with a bunch of our peers and someone gives a speech and asks people to ask questions, you're going to have two or three gunners in the front that are going to say everything, and everyone else is going to stay silent. Fifth graders aren't like that. They get into it. They all want to participate. At the end, I said, you are allowed to ask the lawyers anything you want, and you're allowed to give them feedback on what you didn't understand or what you think they could have done better. Oh my goodness, these kids would read the patent. They'd only been reading for four years. They would pull out sentences. They'd call the lawyers out. They would say, you said this thing, and I have the device right here, and here, I pulled on this, and what you said doesn't make sense. They really lodged in their mind a credibility story, and they would either attack or support the lawyers based on it. Every time I've done it, it's so inspiring.

Khurram Naik: Are there any patterns you've noticed in what these students are identifying for what increases or decreases credibility?

Neel Chatterjee: Because we don't present actual live witnesses, how much the lawyers prepare in advance for the arguments is hugely important. The kids don't necessarily know this person didn't prepare as much as the others, but they infer who really took this seriously, who really understands what they're talking about. Because all our PowerPoints are pre-prepared, people can use them whenever they want. Some people go in and wing it, and some people take it really seriously and might even tweak our graphics a little bit. The presentation is flexible enough that you can anticipate what the other side's going to say and say, you might ask yourself that. That all goes to how much the attorneys prepare and how much they are thoughtful about respecting the jury's time. The kids know it. They call it out.

Khurram Naik: Something I've noticed in different domains is if you don't take something seriously, you don't get much out of it. And what I've observed from successful trial lawyers is that they take juries seriously. Not just that they're important, here's this arbitrary and uninformed force I have to account for, but they really treat them as genuine sources of guidance and counsel, with interesting limitations. No one's mistaken about whether jurors are experts in learning some complex technology. I'd be curious to double back to the concept of using technology over time. Is there something that's changed in how you relate to technology and use it, any prescriptions you have?

Neel's point about "tour guide" jury work comes straight from my conversation with Tim Yoo, who treats trial performance like an elite sport and studies what the best advocates do to help factfinders draw their own conclusions. Listen to my episode with Tim Yoo.

Neel Chatterjee: In what I do, because it is so inaccessible to people sometimes, high-powered graphics with imagery that people can remember, persistent themes, experimentation on coming up with them, making sure things aren't too cluttered, that you start with a very simple concept and then build things out of it, use of technology to help figure out those builds and eliminate the noise, is super important. Animations, if you can use animations, can be really helpful. It is absolutely true that a picture is worth a thousand words.

Neel Chatterjee: This is going to sound weird, but for the opening I did, I also asked Harvey, when should I pause for emphasis? When you're giving a speech, sometimes you're saying something big and dramatic, and you need to pause for a reaction from the audience. You do the same thing in trial, when you want people to think about things. It was enormously helpful on where I should pause. In an opening, they'd say, okay, this graphic is great, but it's going to take a little time to process because there's stuff going on, stop talking for a minute, just let it go. I didn't always agree with it, but it forced a discipline on me to think about, how digestible is this, am I rushing too fast, or can I go faster at particular moments? That's something technology has made an enormous help on. Everybody deals with that when you're dealing with openings or arguments on big cases, pacing, how to get people to know when something's particularly important.

Khurram Naik: I want to double back to your fifth-grader example. Something Tim Yoo talked about in the previous episode: he's a big fan of professional wrestling. He would attend regional circuits where there's up-and-coming wrestlers. He'd observe some of the crowd work they would do or moves they would do, and he would explicitly copy those for use in the big tent. Somebody else might view the fifth-grader thing as somewhere between a chore and a game. This was maybe something like a game for you, but it became something a little more serious, where I guess I'd be surprised to learn that you thought heading into this, I'm going to get some really great insights for how to think about the fundamental principle I want to use when I approach jurors. But you gained this very big-picture insight. Treating somewhat play, playing in other domains and learning from there, and then taking that here, is one thing I've noticed. The other is, what I'm noticing you're doing is, you're really testing every premise along the way. You might have a big-picture reaction to, oh, I've noticed jurors view corporations as profit maximizers. But it sounds like when I'm in a jurisdiction, I test that. Some of these things, like the HP thing, aren't some thesis you had going in. There's opportunism involved, but that flows from being methodical about testing assumptions.

Neel Chatterjee: You never accept premises. We come into things with our own biases, but if you're trying a case in the Eastern District of Texas, or in Minnesota, or in Chicago, where I have cases in all those places right now, what informs people is totally different. What their daily experiences are, and how they feel about various things, are in the juror construction. If you try a case in San Jose about a technical issue, you're just going to be greeted with a lot more suspicion as a plaintiff, because there's so much technology everywhere, and you're going to have jurors who have PhDs and senior executives at tech companies, where it's just going to inform how some of the people feel. If you're in Marshall, Texas, or in Orlando, Florida, the life experience is quite different and people come in with different perspectives. Testing is important because you have assumptions that may not be right.

Khurram Naik: Going back to this concept of, jurors are primarily assessing credibility, it seems that's a tool you can wield no matter which side of the v. you're on. If you're on the "wrong" side in a particular jurisdiction, the credibility premise is a leveler.

Neel Chatterjee: It's essential. I'll give a concrete example. About 10 years ago, I tried a case for a company called MobileIron. MobileIron, like on your iPhone today, your company might have apps on your phone that manage your email for work, and if you leave, it can all be wiped out so you can keep your phone but the enterprise stuff is taken out. MobileIron was one of the pioneers in that area. The company on the other side was literally named Good Technology. Every time we had to get up in court and say something, we had to say the other side was Good. When we were doing voir dire, the very first voir dire question I asked was, the plaintiff's name in this case is Good Technology. Can everyone set that name aside to suggest Good may be bad if the evidence shows it? I asked everyone to raise their hand. That informed the whole case, because it said, look, this name is going to work against me, but I want you to think Good may be bad, because it put together this dichotomy. I might have made a joke like, I'm glad my client didn't name themselves Evil Industries Incorporated, because they're not. Socializing those issues as part of the jury activity is really important. How people may feel about a company may be different from what they're being asked to do here.

Khurram Naik: Has this approach of testing premises showed up elsewhere in your practice? The two big changes in Neel's recent life are leadership role in IP litigation at a new law firm, King & Spalding, and you helped launch an impact organization, Law Firm Partners United. Are those products of this testing mindset?

Neel Chatterjee: For Law Firm Partners United, the answer is no. When it comes to management of roles, I think about it a lot in terms of marketing and business development. I have a very unusual style of marketing and business development. Authenticity is a big part of it. There are standard ways that law firms go about doing things, and as the world evolves, that may or may not make sense. Nobody, for 15 years, no law firm had Instagram pages, and very few law firms have a TikTok presence today, but they should. The young lawyers making TikTok videos about legal stuff have bigger followings and are building bigger practices in some ways than the people uncomfortable with the use of those communication leaders. That's all marketing. The premise that writing an op-ed piece in the New York Times is a great thing to do, I don't mean to minimize that. But the premise that that's the way to get the communication out to the people who need to hear it most is simply incorrect today. We're doing a podcast here today. Ten years ago, people weren't doing this. Looking at the underlying foundations of why we've done things the way we have, and is that the way it should be done today, is fundamental to operating a business, going into court, marketing and business development.

Neel Chatterjee: The one thing about Law Firm Partners United, I refer to it as LFPU, that maybe was breaking the mold, was, because I've done so much social-media-related representation over the years, I knew you could create private groups on LinkedIn, and you could use LinkedIn to promote those private groups. That was a very disruptive way to form a gigantic professional association in a very short period of time. The premise was, people in law firms were like, okay, my law firm's got to do what it's got to do, the business has got to decide what's right for the business, but I personally don't agree with that, and I don't feel good about what's going on, but I don't know how to express a point of view about this. I don't know where I go, I don't know how to release the stress. I woke up one morning during March, and I was just pissed off, and went on to LinkedIn, and I'm going to form a group and just see if people want to talk about this. And then it turned into something totally different from that, much bigger and much more impactful.

Khurram Naik: Have there been efforts you've made to organize around something before that weren't successful, using technology or otherwise?

Neel Chatterjee: There are so many, I can't even count. One thing that happens is when you get people around, they get too big to be able to execute. Everyone just wants to get together and complain about things. For years, I founded the Bay Area Diversity Career Fair 25 years ago. It's now called something different because of all the political issues going on. I still don't understand why "diversity" is the word that's offensive. I thought there was a place to have a national organization that ran these in large legal markets all over the country. I've tried for years to get people together to do it, through different organizations, through different law firms, through bar associations, and I've never been able to get the momentum. It's probably among the most frustrating things that have happened in my career. The Bay Area Diversity Career Fair is a pioneer, it's the most successful recruiting program in the country today. Now it's getting dismantled a little bit. It got hundreds and hundreds of people jobs, and people who are partners in law firms now come back because they got their first job through that job fair. Why I haven't been able to do it on a national level escapes me.

Khurram Naik: Do you have a theory for why?

Neel Chatterjee: Not really. People's priorities are in other places around the country. They have other things they want to be their signature events. One of the big issues in some jurisdictions is venue, where do you do it, that's always a challenge. Here in the Bay Area, it became something where if you didn't go, law students would notice, and the quality of candidates was very high. That created pressure on other law firms to participate. Some law firms abandoned OCI entirely. That kind of pressure would not necessarily occur in other markets. In today's world, the reason we haven't been able to marshal something bigger is because of the disastrous approach to recruiting that law schools and law firms are pursuing. They start recruiting for their 2L summer at the beginning of a 1L year. How you even run a job fair in that circumstance, I don't know.

Neel Chatterjee: The thing I'm most worried about is that kind of program is going to have a material effect on particularly first-gen lawyers, which tends to be more lawyers of color. When you're a first-gen lawyer and the first time you're walking into a law firm, it is a scary place. You don't know how the dialogues work. You don't know how to play the game entirely. You have your own background you're still working through as you walk through this. My parent was a bus driver. I've never walked into a white marble office with a bunch of people in sport coats. It takes time to socialize how that process works. I'm spending a lot of time on that issue right now, how we solve that problem.

Khurram Naik: I ask this because you're involved in the Diversity Career Fair, the Silicon Valley Law Foundation, and now LFPU. Someone might see those as, okay, Neel Chatterjee is a hit machine, everything he touches turns to gold. It's helpful if people understand those setbacks. But going back to authenticity, I think that's something you've been known for for a long time. Even before I knew you, I knew of you, because you were very colorful. That's been a signature part of how you show up at work, being authentically you, having a custom business card with a colorful and unusual thing to say about yourself. I'm curious if your concepts around authenticity have evolved, particularly in the past year, since you just made two major changes.

Neel Chatterjee: I don't know if you've had Rudhir Krishtel on your podcast yet. He's a former law firm partner and now does business development counseling and coaches. I love Rudhir like a brother. There's a handful of South Asian Bar Association people that are my brothers and sisters. When the American Lawyer named me Lawyer of the Year, he called me and said, this is the most amazing thing. I said, thanks, I really appreciate it. He said, no, no, no. This isn't an amazing thing because you got it. It's an amazing thing because you got an award because you're you. I still get choked up at that recognition. The founding of LFPU was, if you talk to the people closest to me, they'd say, wouldn't you kind of expect this to be a Neel thing? Neel would just do something kind of crazy and outspoken and super creative, and he's going to see if it's going to work, and it turns into something bigger, but he didn't even know what it was. A lot of people said that to me. At the same time, it was not easy. There were detractors. There were people coming after me. The learning was to stay true to who you are. It was never a hard decision once we had momentum. People like Nisha Verman and Elizabeth Bond and Haley Morrison, Josh Ackerman, Eric Savage, they just became outspoken people through our group to be authentically themselves as well. They were always that way before, but this gave them a platform. Staying true to that and making people feel empowered that they could do these things is such an important message.

Khurram Naik: Did this take issue with any friendships?

Neel Chatterjee: I don't think it impacted friendships. Different people had different perspectives. Some were like, you should be careful, now you could get targeted. They were more acting out of care for me. When things really got big, when we started doing the amicus briefs, when we had 850 members, and I formed a nonprofit, some people were like, Chatterjee's gone off the rails. He's gone nuts. I'd say, I've gone nuts plenty of times before, and I'm going to go nuts plenty of times in the future. I really believe that for people to be successful, they have to stay true to their values. If their values are to be a little quieter and not outspoken, that's okay. Just be who you are.

Khurram Naik: Tell me about how governance worked in LFPU. This was beyond just, here are my opinions, join me. How did you build a governance mechanism here?

Neel Chatterjee: I treated it in two different ways. One, my experience in running large teams on litigation, having a plan with benchmarks because I deal with a lot of TROs, we had to act really quickly. Second, some of the training and guidance and mentorship I've gotten from others on how to lead large groups. I formed LFPU. I needed a co-founder essentially, and Eric Savage at Littler Mendelson agreed to do it. He's such a great guy. Then I went on LFPU and said, look, this organization is about empowering individuals in the way they feel comfortable. If they want to be public, they can be public. If they don't, they toggle a button and no one will know they're a member. If you want to sign your name onto a brief, you can do that. If you don't want to, you don't have to.

Neel Chatterjee: I didn't want LFPU to be a cult of personality. Very early on, when we were getting a lot of press attention, I got a strategic communications firm involved pro bono. I asked people who would like to be spokespeople. We created, like you do for a client, a set of messaging points and core things. A number of people volunteered. We gave our communications firm, here are the people available to talk to media. We formed a nonprofit. I didn't know how to. I went to LFPU and said, is anyone here a nonprofit lawyer? Five nonprofit lawyers said, I'm a nonprofit lawyer. We scheduled a phone call and they all gave us advice. We talked a lot about how big the board should be, how appointments happen, what the formalities are. We have a governing board of about seven people. The only place we thought it was important that people had to be willing to be public was the board, in case there was ever a request for our corporate board minutes.

Neel Chatterjee: Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco gave LFPU an award a couple weeks ago. A bunch of the LFPU members all flew out from around the country. We all had dinner. We all met live for the first time. What we've done is cool, but the fact that people have become very close friends having never met each other before is almost cooler.

Khurram Naik: Apart from the series of executive orders, what is it? Did this fill some pre-existing gap that this just triggered? And what carries this organization forward?

Neel Chatterjee: First, Law Firm Partners United, a lot of people have characterized it as an anti-Trump organization, which is false. It is a nonpartisan organization where we have plenty of people who are Trump supporters, but they just believe in the rule of law. I don't know if there was a feeling of an unmet need on preserving the rule of law prior to the attacks on law firms. But over the last year, we had the executive orders against law firms, we had the prosecution of Marc Zaid, the ABA suing the government, and this most recent thing where the Department of Justice is saying they want to be exempt from ethics rules. Can you imagine, the highest-ranking governmental officials, who are in charge of putting people in jail, want to be exempt from ethics rules? That they don't want public accountability for things they do correctly or incorrectly? It blows the mind how that could not be considered an attack on the rule of law. The EEOC letters where people want to meddle with law firm business on how they decide to do it. Then the government says those things to create a chilling effect to interfere with the businesses, and then they say, well, it actually wasn't a formal request, so they back off to avoid lawsuits that would invariably follow. These are all things that, in varying degrees, Law Firm Partners United cares about. Some people might feel more strongly about one issue or another, but the big issue is people are really offended by the efforts to challenge law firms trying to do what they consider to be the right thing, representing people in what are sometimes unpopular causes, which is fundamental to our system of justice.

Khurram Naik: One thing you said in your last episode, we were recording December 2023, was that post-pandemic has been more of a challenge. People's connections are weaker and I've been struggling with that. I'm curious to what degree you think something like LFPU or other things you've observed are reactions to that. The other conditional point too is increased mobility at law firms. You yourself are a reflection of that. It used to be that partnership was partnership, people tended to almost literally die at a firm. Now with mobility, there's less tie to any one particular institution.

Neel Chatterjee: I don't know if I tie it to the pandemic, but there are places in the market for people to connect on common ground. I would say there were two things that LFPU did that were absent in the market post-pandemic. One, we've forgotten about the concept of hope. People look at large law firms, oh, they're not doing this or that, and there's this monolithic perspective. When people who have some degree of power, whatever that might be, decide to act independently because they think it's important, it gives the people who look up to them a little more hope about their ability to be themselves, to be outspoken critics, to challenge authority or embrace it. Second, in many ways, the most inspiring part of LFPU, as I said, the group is nonpartisan, is that this particular area was one small area where there's an enormous amount of common ground between people. The Article III Coalition, the Preserving Our Republic group, you'll have a really liberal judge and a really conservative judge joining arms on a common purpose. That taught us there is so much room for people to get along in a world where everything you see on the news is people dividing each other. I think post-COVID, there was a lot of us-versus-them going on. There's a screaming need out there to find areas of common ground on nonpartisan bases, and to recognize we aren't doing enough of that.

Khurram Naik: One early reaction I had to these executive orders and the reactions to them, and I know I'm navigating my role where my goal is to talk about evergreen principles and not talk about politics of the moment, is that this potentially increased public awareness of law firms. My impression is that most people don't really have a good sense of how large law firms are, how impactful they are in society, and how they shape rules. Nobody's given much thought to the pathway from practicing at a large law firm to going to the federal bench, the US attorney's office, state AG's office, or Congress. I'm curious if you've observed something in that way.

Neel Chatterjee: I have two reactions. The first, the cynical piece, is that a lot of law firms are going to do what they're going to do to preserve their business, no matter what they're saying publicly at any particular moment. That's not to say what people did recently is right or wrong. As winds shift, people sometimes do what's in their business interest. The non-cynical piece is there are a lot of people who don't understand what the rule of law means. This attack on law firms shined a light on the concept of elites, and how inaccessible the concepts are to lay people. My dad is a sophisticated guy. He's 88. He's not a lawyer. He had all kinds of questions about what I was doing. He had no idea what rule of law meant. As I explained the importance, he was like, I came here in 1963, I know what India was like during partition, I know what India was like, he grew up in a state referred to as the most lawless society in India, and he said, this is really important what you're doing. That really taught me how this concept of what lawyers do is not known well enough to people unless they intersect with the legal community. One thing I've been very passionate about in various groups, not just LFPU, is, how do we build a public education program that has some degree of virality that makes this not an elite concept, but something fundamental to the way we all live. Without a system of rules and laws written by lawyers, there's a higher likelihood you're going to get poison food. How do we know which side of the road to drive down? Some lawyer wrote those things.

Khurram Naik: I'm curious about the concepts of cynicism and optimism. There's that old joke about two communists walking down the street, and one sees a $20 bill on the ground and the other says, no, no, there's no $20, if there was, somebody would have picked it up by now. The notion is, for there to be an efficient market, some people have to treat it as if there are opportunities to make it efficient. I wonder if cynicism and optimism operate the same way.

Neel Chatterjee: My favorite question of this interview, Khurram. If you look up some of the speeches I've given, I conclude by saying, look, it's easy to sit in a room and have everyone wring their hands and leave with their hands wrung, and then go to the next meeting with their hands being wrung. The way to breed optimism in what feels like a cynical society is to just do something. Whatever it is, big or small, just doing something is better than doing nothing. I've done a riff on a Mother Teresa quote, one person creates a ripple, a community creates a wave, and a number of communities can create sea change. Cynicism serves nothing unless you do something about it. There are opportunities for all of us to do it in big and little ways. That's always been my mantra. I'm not a guy who's going to go out to the street and protest and hold up signs and put my fist in the air. I'm going to be like, this thing pisses me off, what is something creative I can do about it? Sometimes I don't even know what it is entirely, and I just do something. It makes me feel better, and it turns out it makes other people feel better too.

Neel Chatterjee: I've been practicing for 30 years. Today is the best moment in our lives to be practicing law. If you talk to people in their 80s now who are lawyers and ask about their proudest achievements, they are not generally going to talk about the multi-billion-dollar cases they won. They're going to talk about going to Alabama and fighting for voting rights, fighting death penalty cases in Mississippi, fighting discrimination or voter rights or access to schools, the difference they made. What they don't say is that they lost a crap load of stuff along the way, but the difference they made had profound impacts on our society. In my 30 years of practice, other than same-sex rights, we've largely been dealing with the fringes of those issues. How do we move the needle one way or another on things like abortion. In today's world, we are at a fundamental point of reset. We are dealing with the fundamental issues that our mentors and the people we looked up to dealt with 40 or 50 years ago. As a practitioner, it's the greatest time in our lives because we can actually play a role in driving that change.

Khurram Naik: I want to go back to acting on something bigger or small. That resonates with me. We bought a duplex in an up-and-coming neighborhood. Litter was a challenge. We started picking up our neighbors' litter too, then the whole block. We just kept doing it. It trained us to be high agency, that we solve problems before we're given permission to do that. And it gives peace of mind, you've done something. What's common to that and what you're talking about is aligning impact with interest. I was interested in the outcome. My property value improves when litter is removed, that benefits me directly. A lot of times when people hear the phrase pro bono, they hear that as zero-sum, either helps someone else or helps me. Part of what you're talking about is things aligned with your interest and skills that help other people and help you.

Neel Chatterjee: Totally agree. I used to give a presentation to diverse law groups called "Open Up Your Can of Maximum Awesomeness." One of the guidelines is, wear sunglasses because they'll make you look cool. But a more substantive one is, always look for the twofer. In a zero-sum game of time, if you're trying to do any particular thing that only accomplishes one objective, you're not maximizing the value you're creating. For a first-through-third-year associate who works with me, I will tell them, if you haven't sat down and taken a deposition or a couple of them in your first three years, I have failed you. The easiest way to get them that experience is through a pro bono case. Not only are they doing something that fulfills and warms their heart, they're also developing skills. You're doing two things at once. They're learning about going into court, developing a relationship with the court as people who did important work for free. You're accomplishing many objectives at the same time. Just like you, you're picking up litter because you don't like it outside your house, but it also has the benefit of increasing your property values. And a third thing, it demonstrates you as a community leader because other people see you do it and might inspire them. Always going for the twofer is really important, because you can't do everything in an isolated category. You don't have time.

Khurram Naik: I think it's helpful to talk about setbacks too. Early in the pandemic, when conferences shut down, I saw law students getting clobbered with lost jobs. I organized an email to about 100 people saying, let me know if you have a job for a law student. That grew into a newsletter of about 2,500 lawyers. But that was very much of the moment. Post-pandemic, participation plummeted. Even from failed experiments, you never lose, because you grew your network. There are relationships you grow. I learned about email communications metrics. There's a ton of skills and relationships you pick up. This podcast is the same thing. A lot of lawyers are afraid of failure. You never fail when you take these measures.

Neel Chatterjee: There's a book we used to read when we're practicing law, and people are starting to teach lawyers about business, called Good to Great. It's a management book that studied really successful long-term companies and what gave them continuing vitality. One of the things they said is, try a lot of things and keep what works. Simple concept. The unspoken part of that is, if you're keeping what works, there's a whole lot of other things that fail. And you're also learning skills along the way. I made my share of failed gambles or things that didn't work out. Every single thing has been a brick in the foundation of building a career. I've told the story before, I won't repeat it here, about how difficult it was for me to get a job out of law school. When you're sending out 882 resumes and you get two job offers, and the firm that hires you says they're closing at the end of the summer, those are failed experiences. Boy, did I spend a lot of money on postage, back then it was letters. You'll learn from that about how to market yourself, how to deal with rejection and failure, how to pick yourself up and move forward.

Khurram Naik: You said earlier this is the best time to be a lawyer. Something I'm struck with is, this is probably the best time to be an IP lawyer. When I graduated in 2013, pretty much all there was to do was patent litigation, and outside of New York or LA, you weren't doing much in copyright. Now a lawyer can join a practice and work on a trade secrets case, a patent case, maybe an AI copyright dispute, trademark. There's been an explosion. What's your thoughts on what's driving that?

Neel Chatterjee: The single largest asset class in the world today is data. People say data is the new oil. It's not about a physical piece of property. It's about defining a new asset class that has enormous value and not having a legal topology around how you look at this from a regulatory point of view, from a monetization point of view, from a housing point of view. Patents don't do a great job protecting data. Copyright kind of does and kind of doesn't. You're seeing all these generative AI cases that are really about use of data, with copyright as a vehicle. Trade secrets does a pretty good job protecting data, but that's a particularized type of use. In the tech sector, the currency of data, how you protect it, exploit it, monetize it, and what are the regulatory risks, 25 or 30 years since the invention of the internet, those things should be worked out. They're completely undefined. Data can be transformed in so many different ways that are unimaginable. It continues to have an undefined legal framework.

Neel Chatterjee: One of the most amazing things, I'll push back on the IP framing, because I don't know if data rights are IP. They're kind of contract, kind of commercial. One of the biggest things in technology today is how to build data centers, harvest the energy, and make sure you're protecting those places properly from calamity. That's construction law and real estate, but it's fundamental to how the economy works. The legal issues around that are just as important and highly contentious as the other things. You build on some pre-existing system and try to do your best to make analogies. Patents are intangible property. The phrase you hear a lot is "metes and bounds" of a claim, well, literally speaking, that applies to a chunk of land. You do your best with some pre-existing set of analogies when you build the next thing. When Jefferson and others were developing the foundation of patent law, they would have had a very difficult time contemplating what patents would get applied to. You have opportunities to develop new architectures around something.

Khurram Naik: Tell me about your move to King & Spalding. We've talked about risks a number of times. Tell me about the risks you assessed with going over to King & Spalding, and my guess is you saw some asymmetric upside-downside there.

Neel Chatterjee: I had a 15-factor spreadsheet when I was looking, scoring the firm, and there were a couple of firms I was talking to. I was thinking about moving on at a time when there was a much bigger test of values going on between law firms. My move in some ways was a very values-driven decision. Another piece was, I really wanted to build something. I like building. When I joined Orrick, we were teeny tiny in litigation. When I joined Goodwin on the West Coast, we were relatively small in litigation. I really wanted to build something and to get back to doing more large-company litigation as well as representing startups, rather than being almost uniquely startups, not entirely but almost uniquely startups, at Goodwin. Those factors weighed heavily on me.

Neel Chatterjee: King & Spalding has an unbelievable litigation practice. In the AmLaw 50, I think we're one of two firms to have over 50% litigation in our firm. I've been told, I haven't confirmed this, that King & Spalding has more members of the American College of Trial Lawyers than any other big law firm in the top 50. Being surrounded by litigators was really nice. I still feel like I'm learning a lot, and having people I can learn from was great. Those were material considerations. King & Spalding has this unbelievable tech client base, but they were relatively small in the Bay Area, and the IP litigation practice, while outstanding, was also relatively small compared to its peers. It was a unique opportunity to come in, build something, but have this unbelievable platform of talent.

Neel Chatterjee: The hardest set of inquiries was, what does it mean to have shared values? Because of what was going on with LFPU and with me personally, the value was really that the firm allows people to be who they are and say what they think. They weren't going to muzzle people. They were going to respect the individuality that people bring to things. I value big tents where you have people of all perspectives. Not everyone does. King & Spalding was much more on that side of the equation than almost any firm I talked to. It impressed me. The drive, the ambition, the trial lawyering, the caliber of litigation that we do was off the charts. I've been lucky to work with some really top litigation practices, not just as a member of the firm but collaborating with them. The people here were just unbelievably talented. I'm embarrassed because I don't feel smart enough to be here every day.

Khurram Naik: Tell me more about this concept of being a builder. That was definitely a theme in the previous episode. You were in the Silicon Valley office of Orrick, strong brand, San Francisco, very well established, Silicon Valley a new outfit. You were a senior associate when you first moved there, which meant there were options to do things as a builder that other people wouldn't. Kalpana Srinivasan, co-managing partner of Susman Godfrey, has an analogous story. She came up to clerk on the Ninth Circuit, discovered Susman, and said, wow, this is completely different than the white-shoe law firm I felt predestined to go to back in DC. She grew that office. It was a Houston-centric firm, very established there, but California was very new. Now she's co-managing partner of one of the top trial firms in the country. You see this pattern again and again in frontier areas. California historically, and Texas now, are frontier territory in big law. Is this asymmetric payoff of taking a salvaged brand and growing it? I think there are any number of other patent litigators, certain practices with really strong, deep benches of patent litigators. A lot of them are curious about doing what you've done, but they don't know how to wrap their heads around it. How do you help someone know whether they want to be a builder? What are the conditions that set people up for success, and what are the internal traits that really make for builders?

Neel Chatterjee: I don't know how many I can isolate. One of the attributes is creativity. You have to be willing to be creative in a lot of different ways. You have to be very outgoing, because when you're building, you almost have to present yourself in the market as bigger than you are. To build a brand, you kind of have to be everywhere at once. Your peer firms, they have 500 people in their offices, and your office or collective offices may have 30. You have to have that drive to show up and be in a lot of different places at once. That's beyond the just practicing law piece. You have to be exceptional at what you do. You have to get some big high-profile wins to build market presence. Being in the market and being active in the market is really important, in creative and differentiated ways.

Neel Chatterjee: A lot of people hesitant to do the building thing, most of what governs them is risk aversion. You have to be willing to take risks. The phrase is, you never hit a ball if you don't take a swing. I've been really lucky in that going to Orrick at the time I did was counterintuitive, and it was enormously successful, not just for me but for Orrick. Taking those swings is something you've got to be comfortable doing. You've got to be comfortable with, if it doesn't work out, what are you going to do? When I started practicing law, I didn't know if I'd make it in big law. I'd never met an Indian lawyer before I became one. I was going to do what I was going to do, and if they didn't like it, I probably would have become a public interest lawyer. I was comfortable with that when I walked in. I made the decision to be unapologetically me. You have to have those attributes, not necessarily be a weirdo like me. Be willing to take the big swings, take risks, bring whatever creativity you can, be good at what you do, and be willing to work to make yourself present in the market.

Neel Chatterjee: The last thing I'll say: the first judge I worked for had this standard for hiring law clerks: surround yourself with people who are interesting to get to know. I've always taken that in my hiring strategy, and even my client development strategy. Some clients, you're like the most painful moment of their life, and they don't dislike you, but you're a reminder of painful moments. It's like, I would never be friends with my cancer doctor. But surrounding yourself with people who are interesting to get to know and have interesting things to say is super helpful and inspiring.

Neel's case for the builder mindset, creativity, visibility, and willingness to take asymmetric career bets, is exactly what Silpa Maruri described building her new trial boutique Elsberg Baker Maruri from day one, with six trials on the docket in the first four months. Listen to my conversation with Silpa Maruri.

Khurram Naik: Thank you so much, Neel. How do we top that?

Neel Chatterjee: We can't top that. All right, bro. I appreciate you having me here. This is really kind of you, Khurram. You're doing good work here. Appreciate you.

Khurram Naik: All right, thanks.