Asim Bhansali
abhansali@kblfirm.com
Asim Bhansali has spent nearly 25 years as a courtroom trial lawyer and litigator handling the disputes that matter most to his clients, whether they are Fortune 100 companies, new market entrants, or individuals. Asim’s experience includes patent, antitrust, trade-secret, class-action, and commercial-dispute cases. He has served as lead and second-chair counsel in jury trials and arbitrations.
Asim’s accomplishments in the patent arena include defending Limelight Networks as lead counsel in district court after an appellate remand, when Limelight faced entry of a nearly $100 million judgment following the Federal Circuit’s affirmance of a prior jury verdict. In response to the strategy Asim devised, Limelight’s opponent had to drop nearly $37 million of damages claims voluntarily at the onset of the case, and the Court subsequently reduced the prejudgment interest the opponent sought by another $12 million. Asim’s summary judgment record in patent cases includes successfully defending T-Mobile against the assertion of four AT&T Bell Labs patents, in what became a leading case on patent exhaustion. In the commercial arena, Asim and a KBL team recently obtained a judgment of over $7 million in federal court for an enterprise cloud software firm against a major national retail chain on a breach of contract claim, while successfully defending contract and fraud claims in the same matter.
Beyond his zeal for courtroom advocacy, Asim litigates and tries matters because he relishes the detailed knowledge that comes with developing a case strategy, whether it’s about how GPS works, what actually happens when you swipe your credit card, why a doctor might prescribe a particular anti-cholesterol drug, or how to make information travel faster over the Internet. In each instance, he strives to use the knowledge he has gained about his clients and their business to provide more effective representation in the case at hand and in future cases. While Asim’s practice has focused principally on commercial matters, he has brought this same philosophy to pro bono work, particularly for reproductive rights. His work in this area has included district-court litigation against restrictive laws, appellate amicus briefing, and counseling of providers.
Asim’s formative legal experience was serving as a law clerk to the Hon. Ferdinand Fernandez of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit right after graduating cum laude from the University of Texas School of Law, where he was an executive editor for the Texas Law Review. Courtroom advocacy is his passion, and he first became a partner at a full-service, commercial trial and litigation firm when he was 27 years old. Asim’s interest in litigation practice has led him to serve as president and a board member for the Northern District of California chapter of the Federal Bar Association and as a board member and chief financial officer of the Northern District of California Practice Program.
Outside the legal profession, Asim has served in leadership roles on the Boards of the French American International School of San Francisco and the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Center. In his leisure time, Asim tries to make his accent more understandable in several languages: in addition to being bilingual in English and Gujarati since speaking his first words, Asim speaks fluent German and proficient French and Spanish.
Education, Clerkships, Honors:
J.D. with honors, Order of the Coif, Chancellors, University of Texas School of Law
B.B.A., Accounting, with high honors, University of Texas at Austin
Law Clerk to the Hon. Ferdinand Fernandez, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit
Daily Journal Top 40 under 40 (2009)
Best Lawyers in America: Intellectual Property and Patent (2010 - present) and Lawyer of the Year-Patent Litigation in San Francisco (2021)