Blanca Young and Rose Leda Ehler Named Winning Litigators

The National Law Journal named Blanca Young and Rose Leda Ehler on Sept. 1, 2020 as "Winning Litigators: Profiles of Successful Attorneys and Their Strategies” for their counsel in a pivotal copyright infringement case against the movie streaming service VidAngel.

In June 2019, a Los Angeles jury awarded several of Hollywood’s biggest studios $62.4 million in a copyright infringement case against VidAngel. It was one of the largest jury awards of statutory damages ever in a mass-infringement copyright case, on both a per-work and total basis.

The verdict was the result of a carefully planned and executed trial strategy by a Munger, Tolles & Olson team. Ms. Ehler was the architect of the case, who, along with Kelly Klaus, led the strategy and developed the case from start to finish. Ms. Young joined the team for trial and took responsibility for key witnesses and closing argument.

In particular, the National Law Journal noted Ms. Young’s and Ms. Ehler’s work in building an evidentiary case that demonstrated the full scope of VidAngel’s motivations—utilizing VidAngel’s investor documents to show that, whatever their family-friendly motivations, the company was also driven to make a massive profit through unauthorized exploitation of copyrighted movies, undercutting the prices charged by legitimate streaming services like Netflix.

The damages awarded – some of the largest of their kind – send a strong message not just to VidAngel, but other would-be pirates.

Read more about the case here, which was also acknowledged by the Daily Journal with a ‘Top Verdict Honor.’

Blanca Young is a litigation partner in the San Francisco office of Munger, Tolles & Olson. Her practice focuses on complex commercial litigation, with an emphasis on intellectual property, fraud and unfair competition. Rose Leda Ehler is a litigation partner in the Los Angeles office of Munger, Tolles & Olson.

Ms. Ehler litigates high stakes disputes on behalf of a wide variety of clients in the technology and entertainment industries.