Chambers USA has ranked Ahmad, Zavitsanos & Mensing every year since 2014. Its 2026 guide is the first of those thirteen to rate the firm’s appellate practice on its own.
Daryl Moore made the practice’s debut appellate listing, and Kelsi Stayart White was named Up and Coming in the same category. A firm known first for trying cases in front of juries does not automatically build a recognized appeals practice alongside it, and 2026 gave AZA three concrete results that explain why this was the year Chambers looked.
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A Federal Circuit Reversal
The largest of the three came in April, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit erased $17.3 million of an $18.3 million jury verdict in a trade secret dispute over medical device technology, International Medical Devices, Inc. et al. v. Robert Cornell et al. White led the appeal alongside partners Jason McManis and Weining Bai. What remained after the reversal was $1 million tied to a separate trademark infringement finding, which the panel left standing.
The court’s reasoning turned on a doctrine that runs through most trade secret litigation involving patented technology: information a patent has already disclosed publicly cannot also be a trade secret, because secrecy is the thing the law is protecting and a published patent application ends it. That timing detail carries weight. Courts generally measure disclosure from the date a patent application publishes, not the earlier date an inventor filed it with the patent office, so a company can lose trade secret protection well before it learns whether the patent itself will issue. Judge Timothy B. Dyk applied that principle directly to four of the claimed trade secrets at issue.
“We hold that there was no legally sufficient evidentiary basis to support the jury’s finding that plaintiffs had met their burden to show that each of the asserted trade secrets was a protectable trade secret under California law,” Dyk wrote.
A jury had already found otherwise once. Overturning that finding on appeal required convincing three appellate judges that the trial record could not legally support it, a higher bar than persuading a jury to see the case differently the first time.
One piece of the original verdict survived the appeal. The panel left the $1 million trademark infringement finding in place, which means the reversal turned specifically on how the trade secret claims had been proven, not on any broader problem with the case the plaintiffs brought. An appellate team that wins big on one theory while leaving an adjacent finding untouched is doing something more targeted than attacking a verdict wholesale, and the surviving dollar figure is the evidence of that precision.
A new interpretation of an old defense, in Missouri
The second result came in March, from the Missouri Court of Appeals’ Western District, in a class action against a government-run hospital over the sale of patient information. AZA lawyer Emily Adler, working with Antonio X. Milton under partner Foster Johnson, got the court to hold that a public hospital cannot claim sovereign immunity for activity it undertakes for its own financial benefit rather than the public’s.
Judge Alok Ahuja wrote that the hospital’s board “had no immunity when it was not performing a task for the common good of the government’s people but was doing so just for the pecuniary interest of the municipality.” Sovereign immunity ordinarily shields government entities from private lawsuits, and getting an appellate court to carve a proprietary-activity exception into that shield in a new context is a different kind of appellate win than reversing a damages number. It changes what future plaintiffs can argue against similar government defendants, not just what one plaintiff recovered.
“Sovereign immunity can be difficult to overcome, and this was an unexpected and most welcome decision,” Johnson said.
Johnson oversees a broader set of AZA cases challenging hospitals and health systems over the sale of patient information. The ruling gives that team a precedent to cite in its other pending matters against government-run hospitals raising the identical immunity defense, in Missouri and in any court that looks to Missouri’s appellate reasoning.
A national ranking that landed three days before this one
The third data point arrived Aug. 3, when Law360 named both Cameron Byrd and Kelsi White to its 2026 Top Attorneys Under 40, selected from more than 1,100 submissions nationally. Byrd was recognized for trial work, White for appellate work, the same practice area Chambers had just rated the firm in for the first time.
“This is an outstanding honor and well deserved by Cameron and Kelsi, who both quickly distinguished themselves with hard work and exceptional skill and savvy,” said John Zavitsanos, the firm’s managing partner. “We are especially proud at AZA to have two of our best singled out nationally in 2026. It’s an astounding result for a firm our size.”
Two separate national rankings, built on two different research methods, reached the same conclusion about the same lawyer inside the same two-week window. Chambers interviews clients and opposing counsel. Law360 reviews submissions against a set of criteria its editors apply nationally. Neither process talks to the other, which makes the overlap worth more than either ranking alone.
Why an appellate practice takes longer to show up in a directory
Chambers has recognized AZA’s general commercial litigation practice for all 13 years running, because trial results accumulate quickly and visibly, one verdict at a time, in front of the client who hired the firm. An appellate practice builds differently. It requires trial losses or damages awards large enough to be worth appealing, opposing counsel skilled enough to make the appeal genuinely contested, and enough of both over enough years to establish a pattern researchers can point to.
That is a different kind of runway than a trial practice needs, and it explains the gap between the firm’s founding in 1993 and this year’s first appellate rating better than any single case does. AZA’s trial lawyers generate the verdicts. Its appellate lawyers generate results large enough and frequent enough, a nine-figure reversal in one court, a new immunity exception in another, for an outside research team to notice the pattern on its own.
The category itself works differently from the general commercial litigation band the firm has held for 13 years. That ranking measures how a lawyer performs across a caseload over time. An appellate rating measures something narrower: whether a firm’s written advocacy holds up in front of judges who are reading briefs and records rather than watching a trial unfold, and whether it can find the specific legal error, evidentiary gap, or doctrinal opening that turns a lost case into a won one after the fact. Two results in six months, in two different courts applying two different bodies of law, is a small sample. It is also a specific, concrete kind of evidence, the sort that gives a research team something to point to rather than an impression to describe.
