The monthlong trial between Apple and Samsung Electronics was nearing an end when Apple’s lawyer presented an unwanted gift to the judge: a 75-page list of potential witnesses.
The judge, Lucy H. Koh, minced no words.
“Unless you’re smoking crack, you know these witnesses aren’t going to be called when you have less than four hours,” Judge Koh said to Apple’s lawyers after jurors had cleared out of the room.
Despite being relatively new to the bench, Judge Koh quickly gained international attention with her colorful commentary and concise handling of that high-profile jury trial between Apple and Samsung two years ago, which Samsung lost. Since then, she has taken on a number of important cases involving Silicon Valley, like the class-action suit accusing tech companies of colluding to keep employee wages down by agreeing not to poach each other’s workers, and multiple lawsuits involving customers suing Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Apple and Yahoo over privacy concerns. She will oversee a second patent trial between Apple and Samsung that is set to begin this week.
Judge Koh has ended up with some of these tech-related cases in part because she sits in the United States District Court in San Jose, near many Silicon Valley companies. The no-poaching case was transferred from another judge to San Jose, where it was assigned to her randomly. A panel of judges voted to have some privacy-related cases involving Apple and Google consolidated into one district and transferred to Judge Koh.
Appointed to the federal court in 2010, Judge Koh, 45, is the first Asian-American district judge in the Northern District of California. She lives in Silicon Valley with her husband, a Stanford law professor, and their two children.
Judge Koh was born in the United States after her family immigrated from South Korea, and grew up in Mississippi. Her father, who died soon after the first Apple and Samsung patent trial, owned a sandwich shop, where the judge worked while she was a student. Her mother, a college professor, fled North Korea for Seoul when she was young.
The judge attended Harvard for her undergraduate studies and law school, and then worked in Washington for the Senate Judiciary Committee and later for the Justice Department. In 1997, she moved to California to become a federal criminal prosecutor for the United States Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Three years later, she moved to Silicon Valley to be closer to her grandparents, and joined the law firm McDermott Will & Emery, working as a patent litigator for tech companies.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger nominated her to be a judge for the Superior Court of California for Santa Clara County, where she served from 2008 to 2010. In 2010, President Obama nominated her to the federal bench.
Judge Koh has a reputation for keeping strict control of her courtroom. In the first Apple-Samsung patent trial, when Apple bid to block testimony from a Samsung witness, she said: “I don’t trust what any lawyer tells me in this courtroom. I want to see actual papers.”
Brian J. Love, a law professor at Santa Clara University, praised Judge Koh’s style. The longer that lawyers drag on testimony, the more taxpayers’ dollars are at stake, he said.
“She has this exceptional ability to step into the courtroom and be the referee with lots of really high-priced, powerful lawyers,” Mr. Love said. “The duties fall on her to keep things moving in the right direction to protect the jurors’ time and to make sure that the trains run on time.”
In the class action suit involving no-poaching accusations, Apple’s lawyers tried to prevent the company’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, from being questioned before the trial. The lawyers said that during the time period involved, Mr. Cook was Apple’s chief operating officer and was not involved in hiring processes.
“I find it hard to believe a C.O.O. would have no say over salary and compensation for all employees,” Judge Koh responded, and ordered him to testify.
That case is set to go to trial this spring.