Our runners up for Litigator of the Week include Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher partners Jason Mendro and Meryl Young, who won big for JC Penney, securing dismissal with prejudice of a derivative complaint in Delaware Chancery Court. 

The case is noteworthy because it follows on the heels of the so-called “Blue Bell”  decision (captioned Marchand v. Barnhill) by the Delaware Supreme Court. Commentators predicted it would expand liability in lawsuits like this one, where the company’s directors allegedly breached their fiduciary duty of loyalty by failing to oversee the retailer’s compliance with laws governing price-comparison advertising. 

Instead, Chancellor Andre Bouchard sided with the Gibson Dunn team—a powerful indication that strict limits on director liability live on after Blue Bell.

We were also impressed by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan’s Tara Lee, who led a team obtaining a practically unheard of result in a class action concerning the working conditions of a civilian workforce of armed guards employed on US military installations throughout Iraq from 2006-2012. 

The QE team convinced the original district court, whose certification order had already been upheld by the Ninth Circuit, to decertify the class by establishing that the guards didn’t have a uniform work experience.

 Also at Quinn Emanuel, partner David Orta won a jurisdictional victory against the government of Mexico. He represents a group of U.S. investors who opened multiple casinos in Mexico, only to have them seized in 2014 by the Mexican government. The investors sued under the North American Free Trade Agreement. 

The arbitrators backed Orta on jurisdictional grounds, opening the door for the claims to proceed—and awarded QE’s clients $1.4 million in legal fees.