Judge Laporte is a U.S. Magistrate Judge and immediate past Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge for the Northern District of California. Appointed on April 4, 1998, Judge Laporte presides over numerous civil cases, including intellectual property, employment, civil rights and environmental cases. She also presides over criminal matters, conducts settlement conferences, and resolves discovery disputes. She is a Judicial Advisor to The Sedona Conference and Judicial Observer to its Working Group on Electronic Document Retention and Production (WG1) and chaired the Northern District of California Local Rules Committee Subcommittee on E-Discovery, which published the Court’s Guidelines and Checklist for Rule 26(f) Meet and Confer. She is a former Chair of the Executive Board of the Ninth Circuit Magistrate Judges, and was a member of the Jury Trial Improvement Committee of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Laporte launched the Northern District of California’s Women Attorneys Advocacy Project in 2015, which has put on numerous programs on overcoming obstacles to the successful careers of female attorneys. She is the recipient of the 2015 Electronic Discovery Institute Judicial Leadership Award and co-authored a 2015 article, A Practical Guide to Achieving Proportionality Under New Federal Rule of Civil Procedure, published in the Federal Courts Law Review. Judge Laporte was the Judicial Co-Chair of the 2018 Federal Judicial Center and Electronic Discovery Institute’s Judicial Training Program, for which she was also on the faculty. Judge Laporte is a graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School and is a Marshall Scholar, with an M.A. from Oxford University. Prior to her appointment, she was a partner at a litigation firm and an Administrative Law Judge for the California Department of Insurance. Judge Laporte also served as Chief of Special Litigation for the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office and was a law clerk to the Honorable Marilyn Hall Patel and a policy planner/economist at the Federal Trade Commission.