Our first runner-up this week is a cross-disciplinary team at Kirkland & Ellis led by litigation partners Dan Donovan and Judson Brown and bankruptcy partners Pat Nash and Alexandra Schwarzman. The Kirkland team got sign-off this week from a bankruptcy judge in the Southern District of Texas for client Chesapeake Energy Corporation's reorganization plan. The decision from U.S. Bankruptcy Judge David Jones in Houston comes after a rare confirmation trial that involved 13 witnesses testifying over 13 days, all conducted fully remotely over the holidays. The plan allows the oil and gas company to emerge from bankruptcy having shed $7 billion of debt from its balance sheet.

No doubt, it is exceedingly rare to get a person serving a life sentence out of prison, as our Litigator of the Week last week did. It's even a step rarer still to do so when the lead prosecutor in the case has opposed your client's release. That's precisely what a Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan team led by Marc Greenwald, Derek Shaffer and Carolyn Hart did for client William Underwood this week. Underwood, 67, became a model prisoner and mentor to younger inmates while serving more than 30 years of a life without parole sentence for his role in a violent heroin trafficking ring. Despite objections from the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein last Friday granted Underwood compassionate release based on the "particularized dangers" presented by his recent contraction of COVID-19 and "his exceptional record of rehabilitation and service over his three decades in federal custody."

Not to be outdone, also on Friday, a team from Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and the Northern California Innocence Project obtained an incredibly rare declaration of "factual innocence" for Jeremy Puckett, who had spent 18 years on a life without parole sentence after being wrongfully convicted of murder. The ruling, from Sacramento Superior Court Judge Steve White, comes after Puckett's defense team this spring won a ruling overturning his conviction and securing his release just prior to COVID-19 prison lockdowns. The team proved that the prosecutor had withheld hundreds of pages of evidence implicating the true murderer, and showing that the murder actually occurred a day earlier than the prosecution contended at a time when multiple witnesses confirmed that Puckett was at home. Puckett's legal team was led by Simpson Thacher partner Buzz Frahn and associate Jordan Lamothe, as well as NCIP co-founder Linda Starr, and Karyn Sinunu-Towery, a former 30-year veteran of the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office.