Let's get right to this week's runners-up.

First up, a Willkie Farr & Gallagher litigation team led by partner Rich Mancino worked with pro bono partner the Texas Civil Rights Project to win an injunction barring Texas's use of signature-matching procedures for mail-in ballots that have historically disenfranchised thousands of voters each election cycle. U.S. District Chief Judge Orlando Garcia wrote last week that the current process state election officials use violates Texas voters' constitutional rights since it does not provide a method for a voter to fix perceived signature issues. Election officials will be required to provide a voter with a pre-rejection notice and "a meaningful opportunity to cure his or her ballot's rejection" under the order.

A Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan team led by Ray Nimrod and Matthew Robson got a big win on September 10 in the patent fight over CRISPR. No, we're not talking about Snap, Crackle and Pop here. CRISPR-Cas9 is a powerful DNA editing technology that could potentially generate new treatments for cancer and other genetic diseases. The Quinn team scored a key victory before the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board giving their client—the Broad Institute—an earlier priority date for its patent filings than its rival, the University of California. The ruling means Broad will enter the next phase as the "senior party," presumed to be the prior inventor, leaving UC with the burden to prove otherwise.