Around here, Friday means Litigator of the Week. One of the factors we consider in picking a winner is the wider impact of and interest in the litigation. By that measure, this week's winner, Covington & Burling partner Jeffrey Davidson, was a shoo-in.

Davidson and co-counsel won an injunction on Tuesday halting the Trump administration's move to revoke protection for “dreamers”—undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children.

The victory even prompted a tweet from President Donald Trump on Wednesday: “It just shows everyone how broken and unfair our Court System is when the opposing side in a case (such as DACA) always runs to the 9th Circuit and almost always wins before being reversed by higher courts.”

Whether the win will stick is an open question, but for this week, pulling it off earned Davidson the mantle of Litigator of the Week.

Ross Todd, bureau chief for Lit Daily affiliate The Recorder, has the story.

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Litigator of the Week: Keeping the Dream Alive

Covington & Burling litigator Jeffrey Davidson is no stranger to high stakes in the insurance coverage, antitrust and products liability cases he typically handles.

But with the fate of 700,000 so-called “dreamers” hanging in the balance, it's safe to say Davidson has never faced stakes like these. Working pro bono, he and co-counsel from firms including Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher are challenging the Trump administration's decision to wind down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

On Tuesday night, a federal judge in San Francisco gave Davidson and his clients, the Regents of the University of California and U.C. President Janet Napolitano, a milestone victory.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California temporarily blocked a move by Trump's Department of Homeland Security that would end the DACA program, which shields children of undocumented immigrants from deportation. In a 49-page opinion, Alsup granted the plaintiffs' bid to halt the scheduled March 5 DACA rollback. The judge found that the decision to end the Obama-era program was based on a faulty conclusion that the prior administration exceeded its statutory and constitutional authority when implementing it.

In a phone conversation the day after the decision was handed down Davidson said the stakes were “tremendously high.” He called the people affected by the decision “wonderful Americans” and said working on the case has been a “really special” professional experience in keeping with Covington's long standing tradition of pro bono work and public service.

Napolitano, who was one of the architects of the DACA program during her time heading DHS, reached out to Covington because of her ties to partners with whom she served in the Obama Administration. Davidson said that two dozen lawyers at the firm—a team spread across Covington's D.C., San Francisco, and Silicon Valley offices—have worked on the DACA case so far. He leaned on his partners for administrative law expertise, including D.C.-based Mark Lynch.

“This is a D.C. law firm that's been around for a long time, so administrative law is in the wheelhouse in our ordinary practice,” Davidson said.

Covington was far from alone in representing individual dreamers, employers, states, unions, and other groups challenging the administration's DACA decision in the five consolidated cases before Alsup. Eric Brown of Altshuler Berzon, Ethan Dettmer of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, and Mark Rosenbaum of Public Counsel also argued on behalf of plaintiffs at a December hearing, and the plaintiffs have additional counsel from the California Attorney General's Office and Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy.

A spokesman for the Justice Department said after the decision that it was “an unlawful circumvention of Congress” and that the department “looks forward to vindicating its position in further litigation.”

Davidson said that the entire team representing the plaintiffs is committed to litigating the case to finality, if necessary.

“We still need to get to final judgment and we still need to get the complete administrative record from the government and there are still constitutional claims to be litigated,” Davidson said. But he added that he and his he and his co-counsel would welcome a legislative solution—“something to give [dreamers] some permanence and a path to permanent residence.”

Said Davidson, “I think that's what we all hope happens. We're in this to protect these people and we will keep going as long as we have to.”

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Bed Bug Lawyer Strikes Again

Readers may recall Brian Virag, the Southern California lawyer I profiled in October after he won a $546,000 jury verdict for a family bitten by bed bugs during a one-night stay at a Hilton Garden Inn.

That was a record bed bug award—until now. My colleague Cogan Schneier has a story about Virag's latest courtroom triumph: a $3.5 million verdict for 16 renters whose units were infested with the pests.

Seriously, opposing counsel should realize that they don't want to go to trial against this guy. Virag told me he turned down a $10,000 settlement offer before the $546,000 verdict. This time, his opponents offered $55,Bed Bug Lawyer Strikes Again000, and then $200,000 before getting socked with the $3.5 million award.

“It's really a traumatizing experience to go through bed bugs, because you're living with it,” Virag told Cogan. “It affects every portion of your life, from being able to sleep to being able to go to work. You go to work with bites all over your body. It's humiliating; there's a lot of shame involved.”

Read Cogan's full story here.

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Lateral Watch

Appellate law luminary Christopher Landau is leaving Kirkland & Ellis for Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, Above the Law reported on Thursday.

The move by Kirkland's former appellate practice head comes 16 months after the firm acquired Bancroft—and Paul Clement. While Landau has appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court eight times, Clement has had 90 arguments, according to his law firm bio, with 30 of the appearances in the last five terms alone.

That's a long shadow, noted Above the Law's David Lat.

Read additional coverage from The American Lawyer here.

“While Trump is allowing oil companies to drill off the California coast, this oil company was stopped from drilling California's pocketbook.”

Reason number 1,001 not to smoke e-cigarettes.

She took aim at New York Mayor Bill de Blasio's decision to sue five investor-owned fossil fuel companies that he said were “most responsible for global warming.”

Among the works the complaint names as being allegedly pirated are the sci-fi adventure series “Stranger Things” from Netflix and the dystopian post-war drama “The Man in the High Castle” from Amazon.

William Burck is helping ready Bannon for an interview with the House Intelligence Committee next week.

The 66-year old man, who fell 10 feet through a hatch, was assured repeatedly by the ship owner and its insurer that he did not need to file a legal claim—assurances a judge ruled were made in order to run out the clock on a one-year statute of limitations.

A federal judge in Oklahoma ruled this week that the tribal court does not have jurisdiction over the Cherokee Nation's lawsuit against several pharmaceutical distributors and retail pharmacies.