Morgan Chu

His parents emigrated from China during World War II. His brother Steven Chu won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics, and another brother, Gilbert Chu, is a professor of medicine and biochemistry at Stanford.⁠[1]

As a teenager he broke the record for riding the entire New York City subway system in the shortest time.⁠[2]

He did not finish high school but gained admission to the University of California at 16.⁠[3]

As UCLA undergraduates, he and his future wife, Helen Wong, were part of a multiracial coalition of student leaders whose activism helped lead to the founding of UCLA’s ethnic studies centers in 1969; he was one of the founders of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. Born in Hong Kong, Helen Wong Chu graduated from UCLA in 1969.⁠[4]

At UCLA he earned a B.A. in political science in 1971, an M.A. in 1972 and a Ph.D. in 1973, both graduate degrees in education.⁠[5]

His doctoral dissertation, “The Political Influence of Urban Subcommunities: A Study of Compensatory Education and School District Decentralization,” is dated 1974.⁠[6]

He then completed studies at Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry in 1974, received a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1976 and was admitted to the California bar that year.⁠[7]

After law school he clerked for Judge Charles M. MerrillCharles M. MerrillCharles M. Merrill (Charles Merton Merrill, 1907–1996) was an American lawyer and judge who served as a justice of the Supreme Court of Nevada from 1951 to 1959 and as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit from 1959, taking senior status in 1974 and serving until his death in 1996.Open the full entry of the Ninth Circuit. He joined Irell & Manella in 1977, became a partner in 1982, has sat on its executive committee since 1985 and served two terms as co-managing partner, from 1997 to 2003.⁠[8]

In 1986 he was trial counsel in Boole & Babbage v. Candle Corporation, the first trial over a software patent, in which the jury invalidated the patent.⁠[9]

He has served on the board of directors of Public Counsel since 1993.⁠[10]

In 1994 he won a $120 million patent verdict against MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry, and in a 2002 patent case against Genentech he secured $565 million in payments for City of Hope.⁠[2]

In 2006 he was named Outstanding Intellectual Property Lawyer in the United States in the first Chambers Awards for Excellence.⁠[11]

In June 2009 he was elected to a six-year term on HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry’s Board of Overseers.⁠[12]

That year he also received an honorary doctorate from the City of Hope Graduate School of Biological Sciences.⁠[13]

In January 2010 he and Helen gave $2.5 million to City of Hope to establish an endowed chair at its research institute.⁠[14]

In May 2013 he and Helen committed $5 million to Harvard Law School to endow the dean’s chair in perpetuity, with then-dean Martha Minow as its first holder.⁠[15]

In April 2014 he was named president of Harvard’s Board of Overseers for 2014–15.⁠[1]

He described himself as “a temporary steward for an extraordinary institution.”⁠[16]

On July 11, 2014, the Litigation Section of the State Bar of California inducted him into its Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame; he was the only inductee that year.⁠[17]

In 2015 he became a member of the Committee of 100.⁠[9]

He also has a Chinese name.⁠[11]

That year a profile in The American Lawyer dubbed him the “$5 Billion Man.”⁠[18]

In February 2016 Law360 honored him as an “Icon of IP.”⁠[19]

Since 2017 he has chaired the boards of City of Hope National Medical Center and City of Hope Medical Foundation.⁠[13]

On March 8, 2018, he argued for NantKwest before the en banc U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which ruled 7–4 in its favor that July. When the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, he made his first appearance there in October 2019.⁠[20]

He argued for the respondent in Peter v. NantKwest Inc. on October 7, 2019; on December 11 the Court ruled 9–0 that the Patent and Trademark Office cannot recover the salaries of its legal personnel under Section 145 of the Patent Act.⁠[21]

In March 2021, representing VLSI Technology in a patent case against IntelIntelIntel is a semiconductor company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, founded by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore in 1968; it introduced the 4004 microprocessor in 1971, its x86 processors have long powered personal computers, it has pursued a foundry strategy since 2021, and Lip-Bu Tan has been its chief executive officer since 2025.Open the full entry in federal court in Waco, Texas, he won a jury verdict of about $2.18 billion; the jury found the infringement was not willful, and Intel said it would appeal.⁠[22]

An Austin jury later found Intel owed VLSI another $948 million, bringing his verdicts against Intel for VLSI to more than $3 billion.⁠[18]

In March 2021 he and Helen gave $1 million to create the Helen & Morgan Chu CEO Distinguished Chair. “Serving on the organization’s Board of Directors has been one of the honors of my lifetime,” he said.⁠[10]

In June 2022 he was named to the Los Angeles Business Journal’s LA500 list for the fourth year, which described him as “one of the most recognized names in intellectual property litigation.”⁠[23]

In 2023 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.⁠[8]

In February 2024 he and Helen pledged $10 million to the UCLA Institute of American Cultures, the largest gift in its history, endowing chairs across its four ethnic studies centers.⁠[24]

In February 2024, representing Demaray LLC, which sought more than $4 billion from Samsung, he lost a jury trial in the Western District of Texas when the jury found no infringement.⁠[25]

In February 2024 he topped the list of counsel on Elon MuskElon MuskElon Musk is an entrepreneur who founded SpaceX and has long served as chief executive of Tesla; he also took part in creating PayPal, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI. He acquired Twitter in 2022, and his businesses span spaceflight, electric vehicles, energy, artificial intelligence, and social media.Open the full entry’s California state-court lawsuit against OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry and Sam AltmanSam AltmanSam Altman is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenAI. He previously served as president of Y Combinator and founded the location-based social service Loopt. He also helped found Tools for Humanity and Merge Labs, has invested in energy and life sciences ventures, and has driven public discussion of AI governance, employment, and wealth distribution.Open the full entry.⁠[18]

On June 11, 2024, Musk voluntarily dismissed the state-court suit.⁠[26]

In 2025 he and Helen received the Alumni Impact Award from the Asian Pacific Alumni of UCLA and were honored at its gala on May 18.⁠[5]

Chambers Global 2026 ranks him in Band 1 in both Litigation: Trial Lawyers and Intellectual Property: Patent for the United States, quoting the comment “Morgan Chu is truly brilliant. He’s magical in court.”⁠[27]

In October 2026 Harvard Law School announced a $31.4 million gift from Morgan and Helen Chu to endow six new professorships, the largest gift in the school’s history.⁠[3]

“I am grateful to the law school for mistakenly admitting me, where I had a world-class education,” he said.⁠[28]

As lead trial counsel for TiVo he obtained about $1.6 billion from EchoStar, $490 million from Motorola and Cisco, $215 million from AT&TAT&TAT&T (AT&T Inc.) is a telecommunications company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Its predecessor was SBC Communications, a regional holding company created in the 1984 breakup of the Bell System; SBC merged with the original AT&T Corp. in 2005 and adopted its name, and it has since operated a nationwide wireless network and fiber broadband, at one time also owning DIRECTV and WarnerMedia.Open the full entry, and $250 million plus future royalties from VerizonVerizonVerizon (Verizon Communications Inc.) is one of the largest telecommunications carriers in the United States, formed in 2000 through the merger of Bell Atlantic, one of the “Baby Bells,” and GTE. Headquartered in New York City, it operates a nationwide wireless network, Fios fiber broadband and communications services for businesses and government, and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.Open the full entry.⁠[11]

He also won a $1.2 billion judgment for Juno TherapeuticsJuno TherapeuticsJuno Therapeutics is a Seattle-based biotechnology company developing cellular immunotherapies for cancer based on chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell and T cell receptor (TCR) technologies; it listed on Nasdaq in 2014 and was acquired by Celgene in 2018.Open the full entry and Sloan Kettering against Kite Pharma, which was reversed on appeal.⁠[13]

He and Helen gave $2 million to create the Helen and Morgan Chu Endowed Director’s Chair at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, then the largest gift on record for ethnic studies at UCLA.⁠[29]