Emily Cronin

Emily Cronin represents plaintiffs and defendants in high-stakes, complex civil litigation covering a wide array of practice areas.  She has handled cases involving copyright and patent infringement, federal sex trafficking and child pornography, false claims, defamation, contract disputes, fraud, and environmental law, and secured victories for her clients in federal, state, and Delaware Chancery court and in arbitrations.  No matter the subject area, Emily confidently tackles complicated issues and translates them into winning arguments for her clients.

HIGH STAKES LITIGATION

Emily secured a defense victory after a three-day trial in the Delaware Chancery Court arising from a private equity firm’s auction of a short line railroad. The Court rejected the plaintiff’s breach of contract and good faith and fair dealing claims against Emily’s client, the railroad, found breach by a different private equity defendant represented by another firm, and rejected the plaintiff’s $55 million damages model as speculative.

Emily currently represents The New York Times in its groundbreaking copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft over allegations that the companies illegally used millions of Times articles to train their generative AI models, including ChatGPT.  The landmark complaint marked the first time a newspaper publisher sued the developers of a large language model alleging that the model unlawfully trained on the newspaper’s copyrighted content and that responses to user queries are unlawfully reproducing the newspaper’s content.  In April 2025, the case was consolidated into an MDL in the Southern District of New York and the Susman Godfrey team was appointed to serve as liaison to the newspaper plaintiffs.  Read more in the Wall Street Journal.

Emily also represents a class of plaintiffs in a class action against Pornhub’s parent company, MindGeek, over allegations that MindGeek violated federal sex trafficking and child pornography laws by knowingly posting, enabling the posting of, and profiting from tens of thousands of pornographic videos and images featuring persons under the age of 18.  The team has thus far overcome Section 230 at motion to dismiss and certified an international class of at least tens of thousands of victims.

Emily previously represented a group of relators in their California False Claims Act suit against a large international construction contractor and secured a favorable settlement for her clients. In her first and second years of practice, Emily argued and won summary judgment and discovery motions and took and defended dozens of key depositions, including of both side’s damages experts. 

In a patent infringement suit, Emily and her team represented the plaintiff who accused pornography provider MindGeek of video streaming activity that infringed a patent portfolio developed at USC’s Shoah Foundation to catalog videos of Holocaust survivors.  As a first-year associate, Emily argued and won discovery motions, defended depositions, managed a team of source code experts, and helped secure her client’s favorable settlement. 

Emily was also part of the team from Susman Godfrey that filed a $1.6 billion dollar defamation lawsuit against Fox News Media on behalf of Dominion Voting Systems.

BACKGROUND

Emily clerked for the Honorable R. Gary Klausner in the Central District of California and the Honorable Jacqueline Nguyen on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal.

Emily earned her law degree from USC Gould School of Law, where she worked as the Executive Notes Editor of the Southern California Law Review, was awarded the Arthur Manella Award for the second-highest GPA in her 1L and 2L class years, and was inducted into the Order of the Coif.  Before law school, Emily taught middle school math with Teach for America in Detroit and worked as a children’s advocate in a domestic violence shelter in Colorado Springs.  She graduated from Colorado College with a major in Middle Eastern Studies and studied Arabic in Amman, Jordan

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