‘Me Against the World’

In June 2022, months before the release of ChatGPT and the explosion of generative AI, San Francisco antitrust lawyer Joseph Saveri read a blog post describing potential copyright violations with the Microsoft AI tool GitHub Copilot.

Titled “This CoPilot is Stupid and Wants to Kill Me,” the post was written by Matthew Butterick, a lawyer, designer, programmer and author of the book Typography for Lawyers—which Saveri had made required reading for his staff when he opened his firm in 2012. At the time, Saveri had also purchased a font of Butterick’s and reached out to give his compliments; this time, he reached out to ask, “You think there’s a case there?”

The two watched as large language models were first released, both confident that the way those AI models were trained—off the work of artists and authors, largely without their permission—had to be a violation of copyright law.

Saveri’s push prompted Butterick, who had more experience in programming and writing than in court, to reactivate his California Bar license. By November 2022, they’d filed the world’s first generative AI lawsuit on behalf of open-source programmers and against the companies they say stole the material.

“He grew up with Sarah Silverman and knew some people. That was how we got started,” Saveri says. “It was just the two of us, and when we filed that first case against Microsoft, we actually got death threats. They were serious enough that the judge allowed our plaintiffs to proceed anonymously. The first case is Doe v. GitHub, and the reason it’s ‘Doe’ is because … there was a real, credible threat. There was a lot of criticism about how we were wrong and going to set back technology. It was me against the world.”

Fortunately for Saveri—and his clients and co-counsel—it’s a position that suits him.

“He likes to take on these difficult, novel cases, and he saw the possibility of these AI cases before anybody else,” says Butterick. “I have many lawyers on my mailing list … and it was only Joe who reached out. He made up his mind that this was an important cause to get behind, and he went all in on it, filing seven huge class-action cases about an issue that nobody has ever litigated. These are some of the biggest copyright cases that have ever been brought in American history. They pertain to classes of artists and authors—there could be thousands and millions of people in them. They’re enormous. … The risk in that is utterly fantastic.”

Risk is part of the appeal for Saveri, who prides himself on having built his antitrust, class action and complex litigation practice on going where other lawyers fear—or don’t even know—to tread. “Landmark” and “groundbreaking” are words often used to describe his cases, like the one he brought against Apple and Google for allegedly agreeing not to hire each other’s employees. Or like his class action against De Beers for allegedly monopolizing the rough diamond trade; against Bayer for allegedly overpricing the drug Cipro; and against the Ultimate Fighting Championship over fighter compensation—all of which resulted in settlements worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

“Joe’s reputation is as someone who is fearless and willing to take on any group of defendants in any meritorious case,” says Eric Cramer, who has co-counseled multiple antitrust cases with Saveri over the last 25 years as chairman of Berger Montague in Philadelphia. “He’s a risk-taker. He did that while he was at Lieff Cabraser, but then he went out on his own, putting his money on the line funding the cases. … [Leaving Lieff Cabraser] was a very big risk, and he ended up having amazing success after amazing success.”

Walking around his San Francisco office while he talks, Saveri says his comfort with risk has a lot to do with his upbringing: His father, Richard, and uncle, Guido, started Saveri & Saveri in 1959 and were pioneers in the fields of antitrust litigation and class-action law. 

“My father and uncle, without hyperbole, handled some of the most important plaintiff and antitrust cases of the ’50s and ’60s. They also handled some of the very first class actions,” Saveri says. “I grew up around antitrust law, around class actions, around complex litigation. I heard about it at the dinner table. I went to court and saw my family do these cases.”

The family firm also allowed Saveri to see the “ebbs and flows” of how a legal business operates. “I don’t want to say it was feast or famine,” he says. “There was a lot more feast than famine. But that lumpiness was never something I thought was intimidating. I thought it was challenging and interesting.”

After studying economics at UC Berkeley and earning his J.D. from the University of Virginia in 1987, Saveri returned to San Francisco to work for McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen. He cut his teeth on defense litigation until 1992, when he decided to represent plaintiffs.

Joining Lieff Cabraser, he eventually became managing partner of the firm and ran the antitrust and intellectual property practice. “The firm grew from San Francisco and 20 lawyers to five cities and 60 lawyers,” he says. “I built out that business, and then there came a point in time when I wanted to do it myself. I had some ideas about how to do it better, and I was excited about the opportunity. So, in 2012, I left.”

Though he never worked at his family’s firm, as a young attorney he did get the opportunity to co-counsel cases with his father and uncle, who—unsparing in their criticism—taught Saveri a lot. “I’m very conscious of the fact that I learned from a prior generation of lawyers, and I do think part of the mission of this place is to train the next generation,” he says. “My firm is a place where relatively young lawyers get relatively senior experience, so we put our money where our mouth is and give folks who want to do that the opportunity.”

At both Lieff Cabraser and the Joseph Saveri Law Firm, Saveri has spearheaded some of the country’s most complex, groundbreaking antitrust cases—like reverse-payment cases, which refer to large settlements paid by drug companies to the generic manufacturer of a new drug to delay its release. Saveri co-led a reverse-payment litigation involving the antibiotic Cipro, which established rules for how agreements between drug companies and generic competitors are scrutinized under antitrust law. After working its way up to the California Supreme Court in 2015, the case, In re: Cipro Cases I & II, settled for $339 million. 

Similarly, Saveri filed the first lawsuit challenging no-poach agreements among tech companies, who were agreeing to not hire or recruit each other’s employees. “It involved Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt and George Lucas,” he says. “It was a big deal. We closed that case very close to trial, settled it [in 2011] for several hundred million dollars. It was a record.”

Asked how he finds his cases, Saveri says it’s about paying attention. The no-poach litigation was sparked by a San Jose Mercury News story that described Steve Jobs calling and intimidating another executive into not hiring his employees. The reverse-payment cases were spurred by congressional hearings and a Department of Justice investigation. Says Cramer: “He has a nose for which cases are the right ones to bring 

at the right place and time.”

“We also have a pretty good investigative effort,” adds Saveri. In particular, he cites a series of cartel cases involving mostly Japanese capacitor manufacturers who would meet as often as once a week to fix prices, globally. 

“We did that investigation, and subsequently learned that we were right,” Saveri says. “The Department of Justice had, at that point, a secret-but-ongoing criminal investigation, so we filed before the public figured it out. There are a lot of folks whose practices are based on following the government around. We’re better than most at figuring that stuff out before.”

Saveri filed the capacitor case, In re: Capacitors Antitrust Litigation, in 2014 against 20 defendants. After making its way to court in March 2020, COVID forced a mistrial. Two years later, Saveri retried to a settlement, which he says was more than 125% of the single damages. “We probably took 100 depositions, and most of the documents were in Japanese. We hired people to translate, and we had to go to Japan a number of times,” says Saveri. “Part of what’s entailed in that is the ability to pay; it’s resource-intensive. You have to be funded enough to have the resources to do that.”

Cramer, who handled economic experts in the trial, says the dispute speaks to Saveri’s tenacity as a litigator. “We tried that case for 10 days, as we got closer and closer to the world shutting down during COVID. We kept going until the judge sent us all home,” he says. “Joe fought his way back when we tried the case again in December 2021 … and he made sure to settle for top dollar from the last remaining defendant. There were many occasions for him to have decided, ‘This is enough, let’s settle for less.’ But he didn’t: He stuck with it through COVID, through a mistrial, through a second trial, through all the periods in between. There’s a lot of risk there, but the only way to maximize the value of a case is to push the defendant to the brink—which is what he was willing to do.”

In re: Capacitors Antitrust Litigation is not the only eleventh-hour settlement Cramer and Saveri have experienced together. The two worked on a dispute involving the price-fixing of titanium dioxide, a chemical in paint, which settled for $163.5 million just before trial in 2013; and then on an antitrust matter challenging the price of the HIV drug Norvir, which settled during trial in 2011 for $52 million.

At the Norvir trial, Saveri objected to the striking of a juror, arguing they were stricken because they were gay. Post-settlement, one plaintiff pressed on, eventually appealing on the grounds that the juror had been improperly stricken. 

“The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the jury verdict and overturned the decision of the district judge based on this objection put forward by Joe. It was a very interesting and consequential result,” says Cramer. “Joe has a very good strategic mind. … Joe is a very charismatic guy, he’s a hard worker, and he’s always showing up. We’ve become friends over the many years we’ve worked together [and have] similar attitudes toward doing the work right.”

According to Saveri, part of his success has stemmed from his ability to build a network of like-minded lawyers. In the AI suit, for example, his co-counsels have become a “who’s who” of the best law firms around the country, including Boies Schiller Flexner and Susman Godfrey.

“There’s some validation there,” Saveri says.

With actual judicial determinations still months or even years away, Butterick views the growing team as part of an upward trend in his and Saveri’s favor, though he appreciates that Saveri’s commitment is unwavering. 

“It’s great to work alongside someone who has such enthusiasm for the struggle, and I think you need to have that enthusiasm. Not every day is a great day,” Butterick says. “We are bringing claims that have never been tested, so there are definitely days we’ve had judges say to us, ‘No, that’s not going to work.’ But none of this has slowed Joe down. He’s always eager to say, ‘What do we do next? Where do we take it from here?’”