Our runners up include Morgan Chu of Irell & Manella. He led a team in convincing a jury in the Central District of California to award Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research and Juno Therapeutics, Inc. $752 million in a patent infringement suit against Kite Pharma Inc. 

The award included $585 million as an upfront payment and a 27.6% running royalty for Kite's infringement of CAR T-cell therapy, a ground-breaking cancer treatment. (See my colleague Scott Graham's Q&A with Chu about the case here.)

Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher's Matt McGill, Jacob Spencer and Jeremy Christiansen—along with co-counsel Neil Weare of Equally American and Charles V. Ala'ilima of Law Offices of Charles V. Ala'ilima—won a historic pro bono case on behalf of people born in American Samoa. 

Under 8 U.S.C. § 1408(1), those born in the unincorporated South Pacific island territories are "nationals, but not citizens, of the United States," denied the right to vote or serve on juries, as well as other restrictions. U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups in Utah held that persons born in American Samoa are citizens of the United States under the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause, and declared Section 1408(1) unconstitutional on its face. The judge has stayed his ruling pending appeal.

Quinn Emanuel's Joe Paunovich led a team in scoring a final win for Olaplex in a tangled IP fight against L'Oréal involving hair coloring technology. On Thursday, Senior U.S. District Judge Joseph Bataillon in Delaware denied L'Oréal's motion for a new trial, denied their motion to reduce the jury verdict, denied their motion for a new trial based on "unclean hands," and granted Olaplex approximately $14 million in attorney fees on top of $50 million in damages.

"The merits of this case were not close," the judge wrote. "The evidence clearly supports a finding that defendants deliberately copied plaintiffs' technology."

Porter Wright's Jim King represented Rose Acre Farms, Inc. of Seymour, Indiana, and Pepper Hamilton partners Jan Levine and Robin Sumner represented United Egg Producers and United States Egg Marketers in fending off an antitrust suit. A dozen major grocery chains claimed that the defendants conspired to increase the price of eggs. On December 12, a Pennsylvania jury denied the grocery chains' claims.

Also, Pepper Hamilton's Michael Baughman prevailed before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on behalf of Michigan State University, which faced a suit by three students who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by other students and objected to how the university responded. 

The appeals court held that in order for a school to be liable for deliberate indifference under Title IX, the school must have failed to protect a plaintiff against actual further harassment. It isn't enough for plaintiffs to plead that an institution's actions or inactions left them vulnerable to harassment that never materialized.

Jenner & Block chair Craig Martin won an $11 million jury verdict for an imprisoned pro bono client in Springfield, Illinois. 

William Kent Dean has stage-4, metastatic kidney cancer, which is terminal. Despite his obvious and alarming symptoms, Dean did not receive diagnostic testing for four months and did not receive surgery for seven months. The jury found that Wexford Health Sources, Inc. and several of its employees violated Dean's federal civil rights and committed both institutional negligence and medical malpractice under Illinois law.

Erise IP shareholder Eric Buresh won a complete defense verdict in the Eastern District of Texas on behalf of NetScout in a patent infringement suit by Implicit LLC, which demanded $50.3 million. 

Implicit has filed dozens of lawsuits against companies including Intel, Oracle, AMD and Nvidia for infringing its patents related to computer message exchange processing, according to Erise. But the firm says all the prior cases settled—NetScout was the first to go to trial. The jury deliberated for just over two hours before siding with NetScout.

Kirkland & Ellis lawyers including Richard Godfrey, Wendy Bloom and Andrew Bloomer scored a major win for GM in the ignition switch defect and vehicle recalls MDL. 

On December 12, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman in Manhattan denied plaintiffs' motion for reconsideration of summary judgment, rejecting as a matter of law the plaintiff class' economic loss damages—which could have totaled billions of dollars. The suit is one of the largest automotive recall litigation cases in history, involving an alleged 15.59 million vehicles and 37.38 million owners and prior owners.