Our runners up for Litigator of the Week include a pro bono team from Latham & Watkins starring associates Corey Calabrese and Russ Mangas, along with partners Claudia Salomon and Andy Clubok. They prevailed in a six-week voting rights bench trial in the Southern District of New York before U.S. District Judge Cathy Seibel that began on Feb. 10 and concluded via Zoom on March 24.

The Latham team and the New York Civil Liberties Union in NAACP v. East Ramapo Central School District successfully challenged an at-large method of electing school board members, claiming that it unlawfully denies black and Latino citizens in the district an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.

In a rare commercial arbitration that became public, Covington & Burling's Don Brown, Allan Moore, Jeff Davidson and Gretchen Hoff Varner scored a $33 million judgment for ExxonMobil in an insurance coverage dispute.

Over the years, a chemical gasoline additive known as MTBE leaked into groundwater, sparking a rash of product liability lawsuits against ExxonMobil and other oil companies. One of ExxonMobil's insurers, TIG Insurance Co., refused to acknowledge any coverage obligation for the disputes. ExxonMobil and TIG duked it out in arbitration, and ExxonMobil won, but TIG refused to pay up. Now, a judge in the Southern District of New York has ordered them to do so.

Sidley Austin's Gordon Todd led a team in a high-profile and politically charged First Amendment case, successfully representing Clear Channel Outdoor. The billboard company was sued by failed San Francisco mayoral candidate Ellen Zhou and the Asian American Freedom Political Action Committee after Clear Channel took down one of Zhou's billboards—an attack ad against her opponent London Breed that was denounced as racist and inflammatory.

Zhou claimed Breed and Clear Channel Outdoor colluded to deprive her of her First Amendment rights, and that Clear Channel violated its contract. U.S. District Judge William Orrick III dismissed the case with prejudice.

Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan's Rick Werder and Renita Sharma convinced Delaware's highest court to side with their client Borealis Power Holdings Inc. and affiliate BPC Health Corp. in a complex dispute over a stake in Oncor Electric Delivery Co. In a decision that focuses on the meaning of the word "transfer," Borealis secured a first right to a stake in TTHC, a company that itself owns a major stake in Oncor.

Winston & Strawn's co-executive chairman Dan Webb plus partner Matthew Carter and associate Libby Deshaies—along with co-counsel and joint defense counsel from Arnold & Porter, Jones Day, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, and Bartlit Beck—won big at the Supreme Court of Illinois in a long-running case involving lead paint.

The plaintiffs lived in an area designated as high-risk for lead poisoning and had to have their children screened for it. But in their suit, the plaintiffs didn't allege any actual physical injury to their children, and they never paid for the lead screening; Medicaid did. The Illinois high court reversed the appellate court, ruling that the plaintiffs "did not incur any liability and did not suffer any actual economic loss in this case."