Nvidia board member once represented Elizabeth Holmes

A prominent lawyer and Nvidia board member, likely to play a significant role in whether embattled CEO Jensen Huang will keep his job, represented Elizabeth Holmes a decade ago as a legal storm began to catch up with Homes’ company, Theranos. But after not being paid for more than a year, his firm dropped her as a client, court documents said.

But in September 2019, Neal and another Cooley attorney filed a motion to withdraw as Holmes’ counsel, writing that “given Ms. Holmes’s current financial situation, Cooley has no expectation that Ms. Holmes will ever pay it for its services as her counsel.” A judge granted the motion two months later.

“Thus, it is unfair and unreasonable to require Cooley to continue representing Ms. Holmes in this action,” the motion reads. 

Cooley and Neal did not respond to SFGATE’s request for comment. Holmes could not be reached for comment. 

Neal is a corporate trial counsel heavyweight. He’s represented some of the biggest companies in the country in some of their most complex and high profile cases. In that mix are General Motors’ 1986 buyout of Ross Perot and the defense of notorious fraudster Charles Keating, according to his Cooley profile. A Palo Alto resident, Neal has also had stints as the chairman of Levi Strauss and Co. and the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Now, as the Nvidia board’s lead independent director and the head of corporate governance, he may find himself playing a lead role in getting the company at the center of the artificial intelligence boom out of a hot mess.

Nvidia’s chief executive admitted on Sunday in a memo to employees that he was “unfaithful” to his wife of more than forty years. Huang certainly isn’t the first tech CEO to get in trouble for infidelity, but the affair’s alleged threat to national security is a larger public relations headache than getting caught snuggling at a Coldplay concert. 

According to an Oct. 29 investigation by the New York Times, the U.S. had intelligence that a Singaporean firm’s tech executive, with whom Huang was cozy, was actually a spy for China. The newspaper first wrote about their business relationship last year, raising questions about whether her company, Megaspeed, was actually selling Nvidia chips to Chinese AI companies and bypassing the U.S.’s strict trade regulations against its biggest AI rival. An investigation into Megaspeed by the Commerce Department was abruptly halted after a request from Nvidia’s lawyers late last year, according to the Times. 

Huang did not name the woman in his company-wide memo but referenced the national security concerns in his apology. Nvidia’s board wrote in a Sunday statement it was convening a committee of “independent directors, assisted by outside independent counsel” to investigate the situation. 

Nvidia did not respond to SFGATE’s question as to whether Neal would be on that committee. However, Neal is the only board member listed as an “independent director” on the company website. The independent committee announced Tuesday that it had retained former U.S. attorney Joon H. Kim and his firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to lead the investigation.

Contact tech reporter Matthew Brown at [email protected] or matthewbrownsfgate.11 on Signal.