Our first runners-up this week are a team at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. Following a six-day trial last May, Vice Chancellor Sam Glasscock III of the Delaware Court of Chancery late last month ordered Energy Transfer LP to pay Cravath's client The Williams Companies a $410 million termination fee, plus interest, reasonable attorneys' fees and expenses, stemming from their scuttled merger which Energy Transfer walked away from in 2016. "Having called a dirge for the Merger, ETE must pay the piper," Glasscock wrote. The Cravath team was led by partners Antony Ryan, Kevin Orsini, Michael Addis and David Korn.

Runners-up honors also go to Heidi Keefe, Phillip Morton, Mark Weinstein, Elizabeth Stameshkin and Cameron Vanderwall of Cooley who got an impressive patent win for longtime firm client Facebook, or Meta Platforms Inc. as it is now known. A week before a scheduled jury trial last month, U.S. District Judge Alan Albright in Waco, Texas, granted Meta summary judgment in a case brought by USC IP Partnership L.P. related to a patent for determining a website users' intent for visiting a site and using it to suggest webpages for them. The Dec. 20 ruling marked the first time Albright granted a motion invalidating a patent on Section 101 patentability grounds.

Staying on the Meta front, Orin Snyder and Brian Lutz and their team at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher take home runners-up honors for securing dismissal with prejudice of a securities class action tied to major stock price drops in the wake of Facebook's Cambridge Analytica crisis. U.S. District Judge Edward Davila in San Jose, California, last month found that plaintiffs failed to sufficiently allege Facebook's senior officers knew that Cambridge Analytica had lied to Facebook about keeping misappropriated data and using it in connection with the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. The Gibson Dunn team also included Paul Collins, Colin Davis, Michael Kahn, Matthew Reagan, Azadeh Morrison, Brian Yang, Katy Baker and Raena Ferrer Calubaquib.