Our first runners-up this morning are lawyers at BraunHagey & Borden who brought home a $56 million verdict in a trademark case brought on behalf of San Diego craft brewer Stone Brewing against global beer giant Molson Coors. Last week after a three-week trial in San Diego federal court, eight jurors found the larger brewer's Stone-centric rebrand of its Keystone line of beers infringed Stone Brewing's trademark. The infringement verdict appears to be the largest ever in the food and beverage industry. The BraunHagey team was led by Noah Hagey, Jeffrey Theodore and Douglas Curran.

Also landing runners-up honors is a team at Covington & Burling led by Emily Ullman. The Covington lawyers this week got a ruling for AstraZeneca and Bristol Myers Squibb knocking out 18 cases consolidated in California state court alleging that diabetes medications Onglyza and Kombiglyze XR can lead to heart failure and other cardiovascular problems. Judge Anne-Christine Massullo of San Francisco County Superior Court, who is overseeing the California cases, last September excluded the plaintiffs' causation expert. This week the judge granted summary judgment finding that the plaintiffs cannot show general causation under California law. The Covington team also included Paul Schmidt, Phyllis Jones, David Sneed and Kathleen Paley.

A Goodwin Procter team led by Emily Rapalino gets a runner-up nod for securing a non-infringement ruling for Sandoz in patent litigation brought by Genentech and Intermune concerning patents related to Esbriet, a treatment for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a serious lung disease. After a three-day bench trial held last year, U.S. District Judge Richard Andrews in Delaware found last week that Sandoz didn't infringe either of two families of patents for the drug and that one family of patents was invalid because of obviousness. The Goodwin team on the matter also included Daryl Wiesen, Natasha Daughtrey, Kathleen McGuinness, Tiffany Mahmood, Alison Siedor, Tara Thigpen, Beth Ashbridge and Kevin DeJong.