Bethany Lobo

Bethany Lobo is a litigation partner in Kirkland’s Cybersecurity & Data Privacy Practice Group in the Bay Area office. Her practice centers on defending companies facing artificial intelligence, wiretapping, data scraping, biometrics, data breach and cybersecurity disputes. Bethany’s litigation practice spans consumer class actions, mass arbitrations and complex commercial (business-to-business) disputes. She is also experienced in counseling AI, social media and other technology companies on a diverse array of cybersecurity and data privacy issues, including data scraping, wiretapping (e.g., session replay, chatbot, pixel and trap and trace issues), biometrics, incident response and enforcement of online terms of service.

Bethany has repeatedly been honored by the American Lawyer as a Litigator of the Week Runner-Up for her milestone litigation victories:

• For winning the dismissal of a wide-ranging class action alleging against OpenAI, claiming that the company violated the privacy and property rights of Internet users when training its large language models, including ChatGPT — because the plaintiffs’ novel theory would have allowed overreaching privacy and property claims to attach to public information that individuals have voluntarily posted online (2024).
• For winning the dismissal of a consumer class action alleging Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and tort violations based on the hack of a cryptocurrency transmission bridge after a routine code update introduced a vulnerability into the system — because the underlying theory of liability would have improperly reached cryptographic keyholders and investors in the company offering the transmission bridge (2024).
• For establishing on appeal, in a case of first impression, that Turo — a peer-to-peer car sharing marketplace - is not a “rental car company” under California law. The case has broader importance for other online platforms and “sharing economy” companies that enable or facilitate users’ transactions and might otherwise be subject to inappropriate fees, regulations and liability risks (2022).