Katherine A. Petti

A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Katherine graduated with honors from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. Following graduation, she clerked for the Honorable Judge Raymond Kethledge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit before beginning her career in private practice at Williams & Connolly in Washington, DC.

Katherine's primary specialty is representing clients who find themselves with some of the most serious and complex civil litigation matters—regardless of subject matter—and to represent them vigorously in the courtroom, the arbitral arena, the deposition conference room, or the boardroom. This focus has brought her to the areas of media law, defamation, trademark, corporate governance, artificial intelligence, and cryptocurrency, as well as products liability and employment matters. This high-stakes litigation work spans domestic and cross-border proceedings across all aspects of litigation and arbitration: from motions to dismiss, TRO and preliminary injunction hearings, to fact development, extensive deposition experience, and summary adjudication, and through the trial stage, appellate level, and even through the merits stage of the Supreme Court. To that end, she can and has counseled clients from the beginning through the end of the road in our legal system. The high-stakes matters that Katherine has handled have found themselves as front page news, and she thus has deep experience advising clients on navigating the space inside and outside of the courtroom. And speaking of matters outside of the courtroom, her work also includes internal investigations and government investigations, plus preparing clients for congressional testimony. 

While Katherine's primary focus of complex litigation spans subject matters, a few subject matters in brief: Katherine's corporate governance work includes representation of two former board members of a major artificial intelligence company in a variety of matters that have brought widespread media, investor, industry and pundit attention to corporate- governance matters and artificial intelligence regulatory issues. Her cryptocurrency work includes defense of a technology firm against various claims arising after launch of a blockchain. And as to defamation, Katherine has successfully defended clients against various high-stakes defamation claims, prevailing before trial at the motion to dismiss and summary judgment stages, including in matters involving hundreds of millions and billions of dollars of alleged damages. As to defamation trial work, she has represented media companies in some of the most significant defamation cases to advance to trial in the last decade. She defended ABC News in the lawsuit filed by Beef Products Inc. in the noted "Pink Slime" case that went to trial in South Dakota in 2017, and she argued the motion to dismiss on behalf of Fox Broadcasting and Fox Corporation against claims by Dominion Voting Systems brought in 2021 and continued her representation of Fox entities through the resolution of the matters shortly after the outset of trial in Delaware in 2023. The judge in that case after the announcement of settlement, said of both sides, "I have been on the bench since 2010. . . I think this is the best lawyering I've had, ever."

Katherine was selected to the Los Angeles Business Journal's "Women of Influence: Attorneys" issue in 2022 and named to the Washington, DC "Rising Stars" list by Super Lawyers from 2018 through 2020, and to the California "Rising Stars" list by Super Lawyers in 2023 and 2024. For her work at the Supreme Court, Katherine was part of the team named "Legal Lions" by Law360 after a win at the Supreme Court in Midland Funding v. Johnson.