Stella Mao

I'll research this attorney before writing the summary.

Let me dig into the key cases and outcomes.

Stella Mao (W. Stella Mao) — Associate, Morrison & Foerster LLP (Palo Alto)

Focus areas. Mao is an IP litigator in MoFo's Litigation Department whose practice spans district court, the ITC, and PTAB proceedings. Her tracked and reported matters cluster around consumer electronics and imaging hardware/software (camera stabilization, horizon leveling, distortion correction, aspect-ratio conversion), data encryption and cybersecurity software, and cloud/virtualization security. Her technical background — a B.S. in Computer Science from Notre Dame and prior work in Notre Dame's technology transfer office evaluating university inventions — is consistent with that hardware/software mix. Note she practices under the name "W. Stella Mao"; the State Bar of California lists her as Weizhi Mao (aka Stella Mao), and other similarly named attorneys appear in search results (e.g., a Pennsylvania-and-California IP associate with a 2015 Penn Law degree), so care should be taken not to conflate profiles.

Side preference. Her practice is predominantly defense-side. The single tracked appearance is as counsel to the defendant, Arashi Vision (U.S.) LLC d/b/a Insta360. Law360's docket listings show additional defense representations — CrowdStrike (Skysong Innovations v. CrowdStrike, W.D. Tex.) and VMware (UMBRA Technologies v. VMware, N.D. Cal.) — both as the accused infringer. She has, however, also worked the plaintiff side: she was a named team member in Virtru Corporation's patent suit against Microsoft. On the record available, there is no basis to describe her as an NPE/PAE-side filer; her NPE-adjacent work (Skysong, UMBRA, Entropic) has been on the defense team.

Notable matters and outcomes. Her most prominent engagement is GoPro, Inc. v. Arashi Vision (U.S.) LLC / ITC Investigation No. 337-TA-1400, where she was part of the MoFo team (led by partners Lily Li and Mark Whitaker) defending Insta360. The Commission's February 26, 2026 final determination cleared Insta360 on all five asserted utility patents (invalid, not infringed, or both), reversed the ALJ's infringement finding on the '052 distortion patent, and left the limited exclusion order under design patent D789,435 applicable only to older Ace-series models — not Insta360's current U.S. lineup. She is also listed on the MoFo team that secured a confidential settlement for Virtru Corporation against Microsoft in the W.D. Wash. encryption-patent case (U.S. Patent Nos. 8,589,673; 8,874,902; 9,578,021), reached June 11, 2025, one day before jury selection and after the court denied Microsoft's summary-judgment motions in full. In both matters her role was as a team associate rather than lead counsel; public reporting does not attribute discrete arguments or results to her individually.

PTAB/IPR. She has appeared in IPR proceedings, but not as a registered practitioner of record: in April 2025 she sought and was granted pro hac vice admission as petitioner's counsel for Insta360 in an IPR challenging GoPro's '832 patent, attesting to review of the patent, the cited prior art, and the petition. Her declaration describes roughly five years of patent litigation experience at all phases, including Markman practice and invalidity contentions. There is no public indication that she regularly leads IPR filings.

Bar and education. Admitted to the State Bar of California (January 25, 2021) and to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, with admissions to several U.S. district courts; J.D. cum laude, Harvard Law School; B.S. summa cum laude in Computer Science, University of Notre Dame. She joined Morrison & Foerster as an associate in February 2021, her only firm of record in the sources reviewed.