Calif. Federal Court Disqualifies Quinn Emanuel as Defense Counsel in Commercial Real Estate Copyright Dispute

ALM | Law.com 
By Kat Black  
July 14, 2026

What You Need to Know

• A California federal judge has disqualified Quinn Emanuel as the counsel for CREXi, a commercial real estate data analytics firm, in a copyright dispute with rival CoStar dating back to 2020.
• CREXi was previously represented by Keker, Van Nest & Peters until December 2025, when it dropped Keker and retained Quinn Emanuel.
• The judge ruled that Quinn Emanuel had breached its loyalty to CoStar, which it was representing in a separate employment lawsuit, by defending CREXi.

A California federal judge has disqualified Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan from appearing as defense counsel in a long-running and contentious copyright dispute between two competing commercial real estate data analytics firms.

District Judge Consuelo B. Marshall, presiding in the U.S. District for the Central District of California, ruled on Monday that Quinn Emanuel had breached its duty of loyalty to CoStar, which the firm represents in a separate lawsuit in California federal court, by defending Commercial Real Estate Exchange (styled as “CREXi” in court documents) in the copyright case without CoStar’s “informed consent.”

Alex Spiro, a partner at Quinn Emanuel in its New York office who is well known for representing high-profile clients such as billionaire Elon Musk and former New York City Mayor Eric Adams, is leading the defense team for CREXi, based in Los Angeles.

Spiro did not immediately respond to requests for comment by phone or email. “CoStar has spent decades investing in the creation of original real estate content, data, research and photography,” said Andy Florance, CoStar’s founder and CEO, in a statement shared with Law.com.

“The court’s decision reinforces a fundamental principle of the legal profession: A law firm cannot represent a client while simultaneously taking a position adverse to that same client without informed consent. We remain confident in the strength of our case and committed to protecting the intellectual property our employees create every day.”

The case dates back to September 2020, when CoStar Group, the Arlington, Virginiabased developer of online commercial real estate marketplace LoopNet, filed a suit against CREXi alleging copyright infringement and violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (“DMCA”).

According to the complaint, CREXi illegally harvested content from LoopNet and CoStar’s password-protected subscription database— including broker directories, property listing data, listing alerts and, per court documents, almost 50,000 copyrighted images—in order to build its own “clone” of LoopNet.

CREXi, then represented by counsel at Keker, Van Nest & Peters, responded by filing antitrust counterclaims in August 2022 accusing CoStar of monopolizing the real estate market analytics industry in violation of California’s Unfair Competition Law, California’s Cartwright Act and the federal Sherman Act.

The claims, initially dismissed by Judge Marshall in February 2023, were partially reinstated by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in a June 2025 opinion, which found that CREXi “plausibly alleges that CoStar has monopoly power in the relevant markets” and engaged in anticompetitive conduct, but upheld the district court’s dismissal of CREXi’s tortious interference counterclaims against CoStar.

Just two days after the Ninth Circuit issued its ruling, Marshall released an opinion holding that there is «ample evidence» CREXi copied listing information from LoopNet and used offshore agents to crop out CoStar’s watermarks on photographs.

Marshall ruled that the DMCA›s «safe harbor» provision did not apply to CoStar›s copyrighted images and rejected CREXi’s “unclean hands” defense, based on accusations of “massscraping” data from the CREXi platform, as irrelevant to CoStar’s copyright claims.

However, she also found that CoStar had failed to prove that CREXi’s search algorithm was informed by image content in listings or that its marketing blasts infringed on the copyrighted images at issue—and thus, neither function constituted “volitional conduct.”

In addition, she wrote, any images uploaded to CREXi’s website before June 19, 2017— when CoStar started using a pinwheel logo to indicate copyright ownership—could not support CoStar’s DMCA claims.

CREXi subsequently filed a motion to stay the case, which Marshall denied in October 2025. On December 29, 2025, CREXi dropped Keker as its defense counsel and hired Quinn Emanuel, which was, at the time, representing CoStar as a defendant in an employment case in the Northern District of California, captioned Kutagula v. Matterport Inc. and CoStar Group.

District Judge Nathanel M. Cousins granted Quinn Emanuel’s motion to withdraw as CoStar’s Counsel in Kutagula on Feb. 13, almost two months after CREXi retained the firm. According to Quinn Emanuel’s motion to withdraw, CoStar had “raised concerns with Quinn Emanuel about a potential issue arising from Quinn Emanuel’s representation of another client adverse to CoStar in litigation unrelated to Ms. Kutagula” on December 15, 2025.

“Here, the communications between Quinn Emanuel and CoStar in December 2025 demonstrate that (i) CoStar maintains it never agreed to any terms of engagement, including Quinn Emanuel’s standard terms; and (ii) the parties have reached an impasse regarding the fundamental terms governing any attorney- client relationship,” Quinn Emanuel wrote. “This dispute rendered it unreasonably difficult for Quinn Emanuel to continue representing CoStar effectively; Counsel cannot be expected to represent a client when there is fundamental disagreement about the very existence of engagement terms.”

CoStar’s counsel at Latham & Watkins referred requests for comment to CoStar’s general counsel, Gene Boxer.

“Yesterday’s ruling confirms a basic principle that every client is entitled to expect from its lawyers: loyalty,” said Boxer in a statement shared with Law.com.

“The court concluded that Quinn Emanuel could not simultaneously represent CoStar Group in one federal case while appearing against CoStar Group in another without our informed consent, which we did not provide. We appreciate the court’s careful consideration of the issue. CREXi’s strategy is now apparent: When caught stealing CoStar Group’s content, it tried to steal CoStar Group’s lawyers too,” said Boxer.

Boxer continued, “Judge Marshall has already found ‘ample evidence’ that CREXi and its offshore teams copied LoopNet listings, scraped copyrighted photos, and cropped out CoStar Group watermarks as an ‘established practice or policy.’ CREXi lost its safe-harbor defense.

It lost its bid to delay trial. And now it has lost Quinn Emanuel, disqualified for breaching its duty of loyalty to CoStar Group. CREXi is out of excuses, out of delay tactics, and now out of its chosen trial counsel. CREXI’s day of reckoning is nigh.”

A representative for CREXi could not immediately be reached for comment by email.