Jessica R. Bernhardt

Jess represents clients in a wide variety of complex, high-stakes disputes, including breach-of-contract and business tort cases, intellectual property litigation, and personal injury matters. Jess has significant experience in all phases of litigation, including trial. Her experience includes drafting and arguing motions and pretrial issues to the court, strategizing for and negotiating document discovery, preparing fact and expert witnesses to testify, and taking and defending depositions.

Before joining Bartlit Beck in 2022, Jess clerked for the Honorable Joel M. Flaum on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and for the Honorable John Z. Lee on the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. She earned her law degree at Columbia Law School, where she graduated with high honors and was an Articles Editor on the Columbia Law Review. During law school, Jess externed for the Queens County District Attorney’s office prosecuting domestic violence cases, where she interviewed survivors, marshaled evidence, and appeared in court.

Representative Matters

BBP Holdco, et al v. Brunswick Corp. (Delaware Superior Court)
Trial counsel for Brunswick in a three week bench trial, defending against claims brought by the purchasers of one of Brunswick’s former businesses. Plaintiffs asserted claims, including breach of contract and fraud, and sought tens of millions of dollars in damages. Achieved a complete victory when the Court found entirely in Brunswick’s favor, noting that the Plaintiffs had not proven a single one of their claims.

Litigator of the Week Runners-Up and Shout-Outs (The American Lawyer)

Reddit v. John Doe(s) (New York County Supreme Court, New York)
Counsel for Reddit in New York State Court action against unknown parties who have misappropriated Reddit data by engaging in the "scraping" of websites instead of licensing content from Reddit. Reddit is pursuing claims for unfair competition and unjust enrichment relating to the way Artificial Intelligence companies build their Large Language Models. 

Zentian, Ltd. v. Apple, Inc.; Zentian, Ltd. v. Amazon.com, Inc. (W.D. Tex.)
Trial counsel for Zentian in patent infringement actions regarding hardware speech recognition systems and architecture developed in the early 2000s. These technologies facilitate on-device speech recognition functions, including the “always on” wake word/phrase, dictation of text messages and notes, and/or speech recognition for Alexa and/or Siri user requests. Cases are currently pending.

Lionra v. Cisco, Lionra v. Palo Alto Networks, Lionra v. Fortinet (E.D. Tex.)
Trial counsel for plaintiff in three related cases asserting infringement of patents relating to computer network security.  Argued at pretrial conference.  Each of the three cases settled before trial.

Pearson Family Foundation v. The University of Chicago (N.D. Okla.)
Trial counsel for The University of Chicago in dispute arising from $100 million grant agreement. Case settled on the eve of trial.

ET Plus Litigation
National counsel for defendants, Trinity Industries and Valtir, in litigation alleging personal injuries from Trinity’s ET Plus guardrail end terminal system.