We had some great nominations for Litigator of the Week. Our finalists include Dechert's Christopher Ruhland and Jonathan Loeb, who won a complete defense verdict on behalf of Quest Diagnostics in a patent fight with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

A federal jury in Los Angeles rejected claims by Cedars-Sinai that Quest infringed a patent for a method of detecting irritable bowel syndrome, misappropriated trade secrets and breached a confidentiality agreement.

At Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton, partner Neil Popović persuaded U.S. District Judge Edward Davila in the Northern District of California that a French judgment could not be enforced against the publishers of a Pablo Picasso reference work. 

The judge found that the €2 million judgment was "repugnant" to U.S. public policy under California's Uniform Foreign Money-Judgments Recognition Act because French law does not have an analog to the fair use defense to copyright infringement. (For more, see my colleague Scott Graham's story here.)

Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan had multiple contenders. Kathleen Sullivan and William Adams scored a pair of wins before the New York Appellate Division, First Department, clearing the way for two trials involving $3 billion in residential mortgage-backed securities claims. 

In Ambac v. Countrywide, they convinced the court to allow Ambac's claims of fraudulent inducement and breach of contract covering 17 RMBS transactions and 375,000 individual mortgage loans to proceed to a jury trial. And in HEMT v. DLJ, they got a greenlight to try claims—currently worth $1.2 billion with interest accruing daily—that arose from DLJ's breach of the repurchase protocol in four RMBS trusts by failing to repurchase defective mortgage loans.

Also at Quinn Emanuel, partners Diane Doolittle and Bruce Van Dalsem won terminating sanctions in a headline-grabbing, $40 million case involving graphic allegations of sexual assault. A judge in San Mateo County, California dismissed the case against their client, venture capitalist Michael Goguen, after the plaintiff repeatedly refused to comply with discovery orders. (For more, see my story here.)