Neda’s practice emphasizes business and high-technology litigation, as well as complex negotiations and conflict resolution. She serves as the firm’s Chief Legal Officer (CLO), using her extensive trial and business experience to work across multiple client service teams and manage many cases. This perspective is also invaluable in Neda’s negotiations practice. Her ability to clearly see the big picture in tackling emotionally charged and highly complex disputes, often before they reach the press or public court dockets, has saved her clients millions in reputational equity, shareholder value, and litigation expense. Neda routinely is called in to defuse professionally detrimental or personally embarrassing situations for her clients.

Full Bio »

Neda’s practice emphasizes business and high-technology litigation, as well as complex negotiations and conflict resolution. She serves as the firm’s Chief Legal Officer (CLO), using her extensive trial and business experience to work across multiple client service teams and manage many cases. This perspective is also invaluable in Neda’s negotiations practice. Her ability to clearly see the big picture in tackling emotionally charged and highly complex disputes, often before they reach the press or public court dockets, has saved her clients millions in reputational equity, shareholder value, and litigation expense. Neda routinely is called in to defuse professionally detrimental or personally embarrassing situations for her clients.

Neda has represented clients in cases involving intellectual property, extortion, wrongful termination, professional negligence, products liability, general negligence, high-asset marital dissolutions, real estate disputes and breach of contract claims.

Representative Matters

• Brought a swift end to the harassment of a pair of Silicon Valley financial executives faced with reputation-damaging threats from a disgruntled former employee.
• Quietly investigated an internal embezzlement scheme on behalf of a large, publicly traded company, identified the ringleader and negotiated settlement, including a signed confession filed with the D.A.’s office, full restitution and payment of related attorney’s fees.
• Assisted a high-level executive who became the target of paralyzing political pressure within a large public entity. Analyzed the highly complicated situation and identified potential litigation fallout beyond the individuals involved, which – in just one month – provoked a settlement that left both the executive and organization whole.
• Successfully represented defendants in a multifaceted trade secret misappropriation action. Related to online technology, the case involved multiple venues and defendants and featured claims for declaratory relief, breach of contract and unfair competition.
• Intervened on behalf of a veteran executive when a publicly traded, international company targeted the individual to take the fall for an error with the potential to impact its stock price. Defused the toxic situation and worked with company lawyers to negotiate the executive’s graceful exit, severance package and confidentiality agreement, avoiding a PR spectacle and potential whistleblower lawsuit for the company.
• Lead trial attorney in a complex professional negligence and medical battery case involving numerous physicians and insurance carriers that resulted in a substantial confidential recovery for the plaintiff.

Professional and Community Contributions

Neda serves as president-elect of California Women Lawyers (CWL), the state’s only bar association dedicated to the advancement of women in law. A Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, Neda also serves as a faculty member for the University of San Francisco’s Intensive Advocacy Program and is a judge pro tem for the Santa Clara County Superior Court. She is a member of the Santa Clara County Bench-Bar-Media-Police Committee, California Lawyers for the Arts, Queen’s Bench, and American Inns of Court, the Honorable William A. Ingram Inn. She is also a two-term past president of the Santa Clara County Bar Association Women Lawyers Section. Neda is a member of the AAJ (Women Trial Lawyers Caucus and Mentor Program) and the President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Diversity. Neda participates annually in fundraising for the Next Door Battered Women’s Shelter, Support Network and Child Advocates of Silicon Valley.

Awards and Honors

• Daily Journal’s 2013 Top Ten Emerging Law Firm Leaders in California
• Recognized by The Recorder as a Woman Leader in Law, 2012
• Honored by the YWCA of Silicon Valley with a Tribute to Women and Industry (TWIN) Award, 2010
• Named a Woman of Influence by the Silicon Valley Business Journal, 2010
• Named to the Northern California Super Lawyers – Rising Stars in 2009 - 2010
• Named one of the region’s top 40 business people under 40 by the Silicon Valley Business Journal, 2008                 

Admissions

State Bar of California
U.S. District Courts, Northern and Eastern Districts of California

Education

J.D., Santa Clara University School of Law, 1999
B.A., University of California, Berkeley, 1994

Languages

Farsi