Our runners up for Litigator of the Week include a Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan team led by partner Joe Paunovich. He prevailed on behalf of a small startup company, Olaplex LLC, which came up with what it terms “the holy grail of hair product development”—a product that protects hair when you bleach it blonde.

A federal judge ordered three competing products from industry giant L'Oreal USA Inc. off the shelves for infringing Olaplex's technology. As my colleague Scott Graham noted, “Getting an injunction isn't easy in the post-eBay v. Mercexchange era. But getting one on a patent that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board has declared invalid—now that's saying something.”

Another Quinn team merits honorable mention: Mike Carlinsky led a team representing an Italian publisher RCS MediaGroup S.p.A in a transatlantic forum shopping spat against Blackstone Real Estate.  The fight stems from Blackstone's purchase of RCS' historic Milan headquarters for $134 million. The Quinn team successfully argued that the case should be arbitrated in Italy under Italian law, not in New York.

Chris Holding, Brian Burgess and R. Todd Cronan from Goodwin Procter are runners up as well for their work on behalf of bar exam prep experts Barbri. Alleging RICO and antitrust violations, LLM Bar Exam sued Barbri and 11 law schools, claiming that they conspired to keep LLM out of the market. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a decision by the lower court to dismiss LLM's claims.