Let's get right to it with this week's runners-up for Litigator of the Week. 

Robert Wick of Covington & Burling and Richard Pepperman of Sullivan & Cromwell, represented J.P. Morgan Securities and Goldman Sachs & Co. respectively, among others, in scuttling plaintiffs' plans to certify a class in In re Aluminum Warehousing Antitrust Litigation. In a whopping 119-page opinion issued July 23, U.S District Judge Paul Engelmayer in Manhattan found that the plaintiffs, industrial users of aluminum, presented too many individual issues to support class certification in the case accusing the defendants of forming a conspiracy to inflate prices in the primary aluminum market. The judge's ruling leaves just the 10 named plaintiffs' claims standing and eliminates potentially billions in class-wide damages. (Extra kudos to Covington and S&C on the joint nomination.) 

On July 23, lawyers at BraunHagey & Borden in San Francisco and the ACLU Foundation of Oregon convinced U.S. District Judge Michael Simon in Portland to grant a temporary restraining order against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Marshals Service prohibiting federal agents assigned to the city from "arresting, threatening to arrest, or using physical force directed against" journalists and legal observers monitoring the protests there.

Matthew Dontzin of New York boutique Dontzin Nagy & Fleissig gets a shout out as the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom on July 29 sided with his client Jamie Cooper in a five-year-long dispute over a £270 million charitable grant with her ex-husband, hedge fund billionaire Sir Christopher Hohn. 

A Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson team including partner Michael Keats, associates Christopher Bell, Avani Uppalapati and Nicholas Carré, litigation law clerk Agatha Erickson, and summer law clerks Samuel Truesdell and Raquel Panza won approval of a consent decree from U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy in Rhode Island suspending the state's witness requirement for mail-in ballots in a challenge brought by pro bono clients, Common Cause Rhode Island, the League of Women Voters of Rhode Island, and three individual Rhode Island voters.

A Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher team led by partners Orin Snyder, Scott Edelman, Ilissa Samplin, and Brian Ascher scored a major win for AMC Network in a high-stakes suit brought by executive producers of "The Walking Dead" who were seeking hundreds of millions of dollars under "profit participation" contracts. After a bench trial that wrapped in March just before Los Angeles Superior Court shut down due to COVID-19, Judge Daniel Buckle on July 22 sided with AMC on all of the seven contract interpretation issues presented at trial. 

A Latham & Watkins team including Jamie Wine and Kevin McDonough scored an early win in a securities class action against global IT services company DXC Technology Co. when U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman in San Jose, California granted a motion to dismiss on July 27. Freeman's ruling comes after Latham scored another motion to dismiss win last month for DXC in a case brought in the Eastern District of Virginia. 

Here's a shout out to Danya Perry and Samidh Guha of Perry Guha who persuaded U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein in Manhattan that client Michael Cohen's remand into federal custody was retaliation for his forthcoming tell-all book about working as President Donald Trump's personal lawyer. Cohen was re-released to home confinement on July 24, and the government has since given up on its bid to prevent him from working on the book or having any contact with the media while he serves out his sentence.

Russ Hirschhorn of Proskauer Rose got a key ERISA ruling from the Eighth Circuit in a case attempting to hold Wells Fargo liable for stock price drops tied to the bank's fraudulent sales practice scandal. The Eighth Circuit declined to hold the company liable under ERISA for failing to disclose the sales issues sooner.

David Sillers of Sidley Austin and Sarita Prabhu of AT&T along with co-counsel William Holston and Pilar Ferguson of the Human Rights Initiative of North Texas received notice from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that their joint pro bono client, a Burundian journalist and Red Cross employee who was tortured and threatened with death after being linked to the political opposition, was granted permanent asylum in the U.S. along with her three children.

Michael Gottlieb of Willkie Farr & Gallagher won a ruling from the Delaware Supreme Court on July 22 upholding a prior, precedent-setting win at the state's Chancery Court. The decision affirmed the authority of Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó to appoint boards of directors for CITGO Petroleum Corporation entities. The Willkie team also included partners Martin Seidel and Tariq Mundiya, as well as associates Sam Hall, Nick Reddick, and Kat Higginbotham.