The Woman Who Defined Silicon Valley Tech Litigation for the 21st Century
By Goldsea Staff | 24 Dec, 2025

Korean American Judge Lucy Koh presided over clashes of tech titans over rules of the road.

In the early days of Silicon Valley the consequential battles played out in garages, venture capital offices, standards bodies, and occasionally on the floors of Congress.  Judges only refereed disputes after innovation had already reshaped markets.  That changed in the early 21st century when technology companies grew large enough, powerful enough, and socially consequential enough that the law itself became a central battleground.  

At the center of that transformation stood one jurist above others: Lucy Koh.

From a federal courtroom in San Jose, Koh presided over the defining legal conflicts of the modern tech era. Smartphones, app stores, data privacy, antitrust, labor rights, intellectual property, and startup fraud all passed through her courtroom.  Again and again, when Silicon Valley’s titans collided over the rules of the road, it was Koh who decided which arguments would stand, which evidence juries would hear, and which business models might survive legal scrutiny.  No judge before her had such sustained influence over the structure of the digital economy.

Relentless Preparation and Clarity

Lucy Koh’s personal story adds an understated but important dimension to her judicial authority. The daughter of Korean immigrants, she grew up acutely aware of the distance between American institutions and those historically excluded from them.  Friends and former colleagues have noted that her confidence in elite legal settings was hard-earned—through preparation, discipline, and a visible intolerance for intellectual shortcuts.  At Stanford University, she was known less for flash than for relentlessness, a trait that would later define her courtroom demeanor.

After graduating from Harvard Law School, Koh clerked for Judge Eugene Wright of the Ninth Circuit, where she absorbed a pragmatic approach to judging rooted in clarity rather than ideology.  As an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, she earned a reputation for mastering records in exhaustive detail.  Former prosecutors have recalled that Koh often knew case files more thoroughly than opposing counsel, a habit she carried to the bench. Lawyers appearing before her quickly learned that imprecision would not survive even preliminary hearings.

Low Profile and High Confidence

Despite overseeing cases involving billion-dollar corporations and world-famous executives, Koh maintained a notably low public profile. She rarely granted interviews and avoided the celebrity status that attached itself to her courtroom. In one oft-cited anecdote, visiting executives expecting deference were surprised to find a judge who treated them no differently than junior associates.  Authority, in Koh’s courtroom, flowed not from power but from preparation—and she expected the same from everyone who appeared before her.

The Northern District of California sits astride the world’s most valuable cluster of technology companies. As tech disputes grew in scale and complexity, Koh’s courtroom became the venue of choice for battles that combined massive financial stakes with unsettled legal doctrine. Her task was not simply to apply existing law, but to adapt it to technologies that lawmakers had never envisioned.

Apple vs Samsung

The first case to propel her into global prominence was the smartphone patent war between Apple and Samsung. What began as a dispute over design and utility patents became a proxy war over the future of consumer technology. The trial featured dueling visions of innovation, accusations of copying, and damage claims in the billions of dollars.

Koh’s handling of the case—her jury instructions, evidentiary rulings, and post-verdict decisions—reshaped how courts would treat design patents and calculate damages. The litigation ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court, but its center of gravity remained Koh’s courtroom. For the first time, a federal judge had effectively become an arbiter of industrial design norms for a global industry.

Antitrust Shockwaves

If the patent wars established Koh as a judicial heavyweight, antitrust litigation cemented her as a figure of controversy and consequence. Her ruling against Qualcomm in a Federal Trade Commission case challenged the licensing practices underlying the modern wireless industry. Koh concluded that Qualcomm’s business model violated antitrust law by leveraging its market power to extract excessive royalties.

The decision sent shockwaves through the semiconductor world, threatening to upend decades of licensing arrangements. Although the ruling was later reversed on appeal, its impact was profound. It forced policymakers, companies, and courts to confront how antitrust law should apply to foundational technologies in a world of standards and network effects.

Assessing Platform Power

Koh’s courtroom also became the frontline for battles over platform power.  In Epic Games v. Apple, she presided over the first major legal challenge to the App Store model. The case raised questions that regulators around the world were only beginning to grapple with: When does a platform become a gatekeeper? Are app developers customers, competitors, or something else entirely? Can a company that builds an ecosystem dictate the terms of participation within it?

Koh’s nuanced ruling rejected some of Epic’s claims while ordering Apple to loosen certain restrictions, reflecting a judicial effort to balance innovation incentives against market fairness. Even where her decisions disappointed one side or the other, they framed the legal debate for years to come.

Accountability for Privacy Violations

Privacy and data protection formed another pillar of Koh’s legacy. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, she oversaw consolidated consumer litigation against Facebook that resulted in one of the largest privacy settlements in U.S. history. The case signaled that data misuse could carry real financial consequences and that courts were willing to treat digital privacy as a serious legal interest rather than a contractual afterthought. For an industry accustomed to moving fast and apologizing later, Koh’s rulings marked a shift toward accountability.

Restoring Bargaining Power for Employees 

Her influence extended beyond corporate disputes to the labor foundations of the tech economy. In cases involving illegal “no-poach” agreements among major tech firms, Koh approved settlements that exposed collusion suppressing employee wages and mobility. The litigation forced Silicon Valley to confront uncomfortable truths about its labor practices and helped reestablish competition for talent as a legal imperative.  Similarly, her handling of early gig-economy cases involving Uber highlighted the tensions between flexible work models and traditional employment law, setting the stage for legislative and electoral battles that followed.

Limiting Tech Exceptionalism in Theranos

Even the mythology of Silicon Valley itself came under Koh’s scrutiny.  In proceedings related to the Theranos fraud, she made critical pretrial rulings that shaped how one of the most notorious startup scandals would be presented to a jury. The case punctured the idea that visionary storytelling could excuse deception and underscored the judiciary’s role in policing the boundary between ambition and fraud.

What distinguished Koh throughout these cases was not ideological zeal but judicial seriousness. She was neither reflexively hostile to technology companies nor deferential to their claims of exceptionalism. Her opinions reflected careful engagement with technical details, economic theory, and legal precedent. She demanded rigorous argumentation and showed little patience for theatrics. To Silicon Valley executives accustomed to controlling narratives, her courtroom could feel alien and unforgiving.

Critics, particularly from industry circles, accused Koh of overreach, arguing that complex technology markets were ill-suited to judicial intervention. Supporters countered that without judges willing to engage deeply with these issues, the law would lag hopelessly behind reality. The truth lies somewhere in between. Koh’s rulings did not always survive appellate review, but even reversals testified to the significance of the questions she raised. By forcing higher courts to confront them, she accelerated the evolution of tech law.

Elevation to the Ninth Circuit

In 2022 Koh was elevated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, ending an era in which a single district judge wielded extraordinary influence over Silicon Valley. Her departure marked the close of a chapter, but not the end of her impact. The legal frameworks she helped shape continue to govern how technology companies design products, negotiate licenses, treat workers, and handle user data.

Lucy Koh didn't try to regulate the digital economy from the bench.   But at a moment when technology outpaced legislation and rewrote the terms of modern life, she became the judge who translated innovation into law.   In doing so, she defined what tech litigation would look like in the 21st century: complex, consequential, global, and inescapably central to the future of capitalism itself.