Our runners up for Litigator of the Week include Paul, Weiss partners Ted Wells and Alex Oh for their win on behalf of ExxonMobil in a long-running Alien Tort case.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington, D.C. dismissed all of the Alien Tort Statute claims alleging that the oil company—while operating its natural gas extraction facility in Aceh, Indonesia—was complicit in human rights violations committed by Indonesian soldiers against Acehnese citizens. Only garden-variety Indonesian tort law claims against ExxonMobil now remain at issue at the suit.

Jenner & Block partner Rick Richmond led a team that included partner AnnaMarie Van Hoesen in scoring a defense win following a two-week jury trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

Jenner's client was sued by his brother, who sought $250 million from him as his share of an alleged partnership interest. An added challenge:  All of the trial witnesses spoke the Indian language of Gujarati, and several witnesses testified through translators.

Mayer Brown's Ward Johnson working in conjunction with Stanford Law School won the release of Kenneth Oliver, a nonviolent “Three Strikes” offender in California who had served 23 years of a life sentence based on a 1997 conviction for joyriding.

Oliver also received a $125,000 settlement for spending eight years in solitary confinement after corrections officers found a copy of George Jackson's classic book Blood in my Eye in his jail cell.

A team from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher led by Mark Kirsch won dismissal with prejudice of a shareholder class action against multinational mining firm Rio Tinto. The suit was filed in October of 2017 on the heels of a civil suit against the company by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

On June 3, U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres in Manhattan ruled that some of the claims were time barred, others lacked the requisite scienter, others were not actually misleading and the remaining ones were immaterial.