Representative Matters

The Firm represented a global enterprise software company in an action for trade secret misappropriation against a major competitor. Our team presented evidence that the defendant, attempting to gain a competitive advantage, had engaged in corporate espionage by recruiting an employee of a government contractor to access our client’s software. Following a seven-week trial, the jury found that the defendant had indeed misappropriated our client’s trade secrets, and awarded our client over $2 billion in damages.
We are the leading law firm representing the financial guaranty (or "monoline") insurance industry in its efforts to recover against financial institutions and other sponsors of RMBS for breaches of representations and warranties and other claims relating to the quality of the mortgage loans included in these transactions. We represent several monoline insurers in their remediation efforts relating to dozens of separate RMBS transactions, including investigation and prosecution of billions of dollars in claims for breaches of representations and warranties and other wrongdoing against some of the world's largest financial institutions, as well as advising on restructuring and other loss-mitigation options.
We won dismissal of industrial espionage matter at summary judgment arising from a competitor’s allegation that our client, a Fortune 500 financial information and analytics company, employed consultants to illegally access a proprietary database. After winning dismissal of the RICO claims at the motion to dismiss stage, our team won summary judgment decision dismissing Sherman Act, Lanham Act, and myriad state law claims and leaving only limited claim of unfair competition that plaintiff voluntarily dismissed. After a two-day hearing, our team won motion excluding adversary's damage expert. The Second Circuit affirmed the district court’s summary judgment decision resulting in a complete victory for our client.
The Firm secured a federal jury verdict for the world’s leading beverage company in a landmark advertising dispute over juice labeling. In the original California district court case, we obtained summary judgment dismissing the federal and state-law claims against our client, and obtained an affirmance of the summary judgment ruling on the federal claim in the Ninth Circuit. The U.S. Supreme Court subsequently vacated the Ninth Circuit’s decision, and remanded the federal claim for trial. The California federal jury rejected the claim in full, returning a verdict in our client’s favor after a six-day trial and less than a day of deliberation.
We have been representing one of the nation’s largest commercial banks as a defendant in a long-running series of litigations alleging violations of the antitrust laws by Visa, Mastercard, and a number of banks in the issuance of credit and debit cards. Several of the cases, including national class actions of merchants, have been settled.
We secured a groundbreaking victory when the District of Delaware dismissed an enforcement action brought by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ("CFPB") against fifteen student loan trusts. The decision came in the wake of a recent Supreme Court’s holding that the CFPB was unconstitutionally structured, which left lower courts to resolve whether the CFPB could salvage individual cases by “ratifying” its earlier decisions to bring them. In granting the motion to dismiss, the district court recognized that the statute of limitations had run on the CFPB’s claims; that the CFPB’s attempted ratification therefore came too late to be effective; and that CFPB was not entitled to equitable tolling because it had failed to diligently protect its rights. This was the first decision nationwide to dismiss a CFPB enforcement action on these grounds.
The Firm secured a significant victory for our client, a Fortune 500 publishing company, with the full dismissal of a multi-district antitrust litigation in the Southern District of New York. The multi-district litigation consolidated a number of putative class action lawsuits alleging that our client, along with other textbook publishers and retailers, violated various federal and state antitrust laws through its implementation of Inclusive Access, a program authorized by federal regulation whereby students may be automatically billed for and automatically receive digital course materials selected by their professor.
We obtained a significant victory for our client when the Federal Circuit affirmed a district court’s decision, following a bench trial, that our client’s blockbuster HIV drug should enter the United States duty-free. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection ("CBP") had sought to impose duties exceeding $100 million on the drug, darunavir ethanolate, which is the drug substance in HIV medication PREZISTA®. In its opinion, the Federal Circuit confirmed that the listing of “darunavir” on the Pharmaceutical Appendix to the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States covers the imported product, darunavir ethanolate. As a result, both retroactively and going forward, this lifesaving pharmaceutical will be imported free of duty.
The Firm secured a $43 million settlement for a multinational biotech company, in an anti-counterfeiting case in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama in which a group of pharmacies were selling consumers thousands of boxes of our client’s blood glucose test strips that were not intended for retail sale. The terms of the settlement included a permanent injunction against the defendants that prohibits them from adjudicating, purchasing, selling, distributing or dispensing our client’s test strips.
We obtained dismissal of claims that our client, a former officer of a marine fuel company, and three former members of the company’s board of directors breached their fiduciary duties to the company by failing to properly monitor and thereby uncover the fraudulent activities of the company’s former CEO.
We secured an appellate win in a novel class action concerning the labeling of chocolates produced by our client, a Fortune 500 chocolate manufacturer. The plaintiff alleged that our client’s product labeling violated Massachusetts consumer protection laws because it did not disclose that some cocoa may be indirectly sourced from regions in West Africa where child labor is used. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit unanimously affirmed in a precedential decision, agreeing with our argument that product labels need not disclose everything a consumer might wish to know.
The Firm scored a major victory for two medical device manufacturers when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a district court decision granting summary judgment of noninfringement in a patent case involving blood-glucose test strips. The Federal Circuit applied the doctrine of prosecution history estoppel in affirming the district court’s ruling that our clients did not infringe the patents asserted against them.
We scored a major victory for our client, a global pharmaceutical company, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed a district court’s summary judgment ruling in a long-running civil RICO case. The plaintiff, a regional health insurance company, originally filed suit against our client and several other pharmaceutical manufacturers, alleging improper “off-label” marketing of certain prescription medications to insurers, physicians, and patients. The insurer sought certification of a nationwide class of third-party payors and damages based on over a decade of reimbursements of the drugs in question. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois awarded summary judgment to our client as to all of the insurer’s claims, and the Seventh Circuit unanimously affirmed.
After securing dismissal of a False Claims Act (“FCA”) complaint for a major pharmaceutical client, we successfully defended that victory before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. In a unanimous decision addressing the pleading demands for complaints filed under the FCA, the Fourth Circuit rejected the relator’s request to apply a more lenient pleading requirement in cases in which a relator is unable to show that actual false claims were submitted for government reimbursement.
We represented a leading biotechnology company in a number of high-stakes commercial arbitrations over patent and other IP rights to best-selling monoclonal antibody and recombinant protein therapies.
For more than a decade we represented a medical device manufacturer in a series of “bet-the-company” patent litigations relating to coronary stents. We conducted 14 trials, preliminary injunction hearings and arbitrations involving infringement, enforceability and validity issues. The last of the disputes settled with our client receiving $1.725 billion. In total, this client collected more than $3.6 billion. In addition, we obtained a reversal in the Federal Circuit of a $593 million jury verdict related to coronary stents.