Lucy Koh Hears Apple-Samsung Case

Federal judge Lucy Koh will decide the massive, multi-billion-dollar Samsung-Apple patent suit in the U.S.

The massive, multi-billion-dollar Samsung-Apple patent suit — which may determine the fortunes of the two consumer-electronics behemoths for years to come — is being heard in the U.S. by federal district court Judge Lucy Koh.

The first hearing in front of Koh took place Thursday. Koh denied the preliminary injunction requested by Apple to halt sales of Samsung’s Galaxy S 10.1 4G tablet on the ground that it wasn’t yet clear that Apple would be able to establish the validity of the utility patents on which it based the injunction request.

That doesn’t mean that Samsung is out of the woods. During the hearing Koh seemed to imply that the degree of similarity between the Apple and Samsung tablets suggests a high likelihood of other patent infringements that may serve as the basis for a future injunction.

To make her point Koh held both tablets above her head and asked Samsung’s attorneys to distinguish one from the other. The effort it took for them showed that the number of similarities go far beyond the utility patents that were the focus of the first hearing. Therefore, Apple’s design patents are likely to become the focus of the litigation before Judge Koh. The two companies are also duking it out in courts all over the world, including Holland, France, Germany, Australia and S. Korea.

Koh is notable as the first Korean American female federal judge in California, as well as the first Asian American district judge in northern California. Her heritage may pose an awkward perception problem for her due to the fact that Samsung is generally regarded as one of Korea’s two leading companies, despite the fact that Koh was born in Washington, D.C.

Lucy Koh graduated from Harvard in 1990 and from Harvard Law School in 1993. She began her legal career in 1993 working for the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary as a Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow. In 1994 Koh moved to the Department of Justice where she served for two years as a Special Counsel in the Office of Legislative Affairs, then as a Special Assistant to the Deputy Attorney General.

In 1997 Koh became an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California. In 2000 she moved to the Palo Alto firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. In 2002 she became a partner at the Silicon Valley office of McDermott Will & Emery focusing on patent and trade secrets litigation. In January 2008 she was appointed to the bench of the Superior Court of California for Santa Clara County by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

On January 20 of 2010 she was nominated by President Obama to the District Court for the Northern of California on the recommendation of Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. She was confirmed by the full senate by a 90-0 vote and took to the bench on June 9, 2010.

Koh is married to Stanford law professor Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar.