Our runners up for Litigator of the Week include Cravath Swaine & Moore partners Peter Barbur, Rory Leraris, Evan Chesler and Kevin Orsini. They prevailed on behalf of American Express Co., convincing U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis in the Eastern District of New York to shut down an antitrust suit brought by two putative classes of merchant plaintiffs. 

Garaufis ruled that the merchant plaintiffs who accept AmEx cards must individually arbitrate their complaints about the company's anti-steering provisions, which bar merchants from discouraging customers from using an AmEx card at the point of sale. As for the merchants who don't accept AmEx, the judge granted the Cravath team's motion to dismiss their claims.

Covington & Burling's Paul Schmidt and Colleen Hennessey of Peabody & Arnold scored a major win for Hoffmann-LaRoche before the Appellate Division of the New Jersey Supreme Court in a 17-year fight over the acne medicine Accutane.

At issue: Does Accutane cause ulcerative colitis? In 2017, the trial court judge excluded testimony by the plaintiffs' experts about the link. On Jan. 17, the appellate court upheld that decision—and likely to put end to 3,231 individual cases by people who blamed Accutane for their chronic inflammatory bowel disease. 

Carey Ramos, Sam Williamson and Xiao Liu of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan scored for five Chinese banks in a $150 million fight in the Southern District of New York. 

The dispute began when Nike and Converse won a $1.8 billion default judgment against 636 counterfeiters in China for selling knock-off sneakers. The shoemakers sold the judgment to Next Investments, which in trying to collect wanted the banks to freeze the counterfeiters' assets. Next complained that the banks dropped the ball and wanted $150 million in damages.

But U.S. District Chief Judge Colleen McMahon in an issue of first impression denied Next's contempt motion, ruling that "it seeks to hold the banks liable for violating orders that never bound them."