Ross Kimbarovsky

Over a career spanning three decades, Ross Kimbarovsky has tried and won jury and bench trials, argued appeals, and both prosecuted and defended class actions in technology, intellectual property, and complex commercial disputes—matters with exposure ranging from hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. He now represents creators and consumers in some of the most consequential generative-AI and biometric-privacy cases in the country.

Ross serves as lead trial counsel for independent musicians in nationwide class actions against the generative AI music companies Suno and Udio, and against Google and Kunlun Tech/Skywork AI, alleging that these companies copied vast libraries of copyrighted sound recordings to train and operate competing music products, stripping copyright-management information in the process. Those cases assert claims for copyright infringement, DMCA violations, false endorsement, the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), the Illinois Right of Publicity Act, and related state-law claims.

In May 2026, Ross brought nine class actions at once against Adobe, Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, ElevenLabs, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Samsung—among the largest companies in the world—on behalf of nationally recognized broadcast journalists, podcasters, audiobook narrators, and voice actors. The suits allege that these companies captured the plaintiffs’ voiceprints, stored them, and fed them into AI training pipelines without the written notice, consent, or retention policies BIPA requires, building a multibillion-dollar voice-AI industry on the voices of real people and then using that technology to compete with the very people whose voices trained it. Biometric identifiers are unlike any other personal data: a Social Security number can be changed and a password reset, but once a voiceprint or faceprint is taken, it cannot be undone.

Ross began his legal career in 1995 at Hopkins & Sutter, litigating complex commercial and intellectual property disputes in state and federal courts and contested regulatory proceedings before the Illinois Commerce Commission. He later became a partner at Ungaretti & Harris LLP, where he chaired the firm’s Intellectual Property group. His trial work from those years spanned patent, trade-secret, software, and computer-intrusion cases, including DMCA claims he litigated on appeal to the Federal Circuit. It also ranged from a full defense verdict, after a bench trial, on all causes of action, in a nationally certified class action seeking more than $125 million, to a $4.6 billion administrative trial in which he helped defend a major airport improvement project at Miami International Airport against a challenge by six major airlines.

In 2007, Ross left large-firm practice to build and lead technology companies. He founded and ran a venture that served hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide, and from 2014 to 2017 he founded a second startup, where he led multiple teams building AI products, in the years before the transformer architecture that underlies today’s generative-AI systems was introduced. That experience shapes how he litigates against technology defendants now: having built AI products, managed user data, and run technology companies from the inside, he understands not only what these companies did, but how and why they did it.

Ross has been recognized as an Illinois Super Lawyer and named one of “40 Illinois Attorneys Under Forty To Watch.” He received his J.D. from the University of Illinois College of Law in 1995 and his B.A. from Northwestern University in 1992

BAR ADMISSIONS

• Illinois Supreme Court
• U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois
• U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida
• U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona
• U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
• U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit
• U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit