Our first runners-up got a ruling this week from a federal judge in San Francisco finding Walgreens liable for substantially contributing to the opioid epidemic in the city. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer found that Walgreens, the city's largest dispenser of prescription painkillers, failed to maintain an effective system for identifying suspicious orders. He wrote there now will be a second trial "to determine the extent to which Walgreens must abate the public nuisance that it helped to create." The ruling comes after drug companies Teva and Allergan reached a $54 million settlement with the city just prior to closing arguments, Endo settled for $10 million in the run-up to trial, and Johnson & Johnson and three distributors previously settled for $60 million. The trial team from the office of San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu included Owen Clements, Sara Eisenberg, John George, Jaime Huling-Delaye and Phil Wilkinson alongside additional private counsel led by Aelish Baig of Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd; Jayne Conroy of Simmons Hanly Conroy; Richard Heimann of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein; and Peter Mougey of Levin Papantonio.

Litigators at Keker, Van Nest & Peters and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom also land runners-up honors in the case they're handling for the PGA Tour involving antitrust claims brought by suspended golfers who have joined the professional golf tour's upstart rivals at the LIV Golf Invitational Series. U.S. District Judge Beth Freeman this week denied three LIV players' bid for a temporary restraining order allowing them to play in PGA Tour's FedExCup Playoffs finding the players didn't face irreparable harm given the significant guarantees they received for signing on with Saudi-backed LIV Golf. The Keker team is led by Elliot Peters, who argued the TRO, and includes Leo Lam, David Silbert, Brook Dooley, Eric MacMichael, Adam Lauridsen, Nick Goldberg, Tom Gorman, Nic Marais, Sophie Hood, Taylor Reeves, Nick Green, and Stephanie Goldberg. The Skadden team includes partners Anthony Dreyer, Karen Lent, Matthew Martino and Patrick Fitzgerald, counsel Peter Julian, and associates Michael Folger, Zachary Siegler, Katherine Calabrese and Adam Kochman.

Runner-up honors also go to Chad Landmon and Matt Murphy of Axinn, Veltrop & Harkrider who got a key ruling for Norwich Pharmaceuticals and  Alvogen in their efforts to market a generic form of Salix Pharmaceuticals'  Xifaxan, a drug used to treat irritable bowel syndrome with diarrhea, or IBS-D, and reduce the risk of a neurological complication of liver disease. U.S. District Judge Richard Andrews in Delaware issued a written opinion this week finding the patent claims Salix asserted covering the use of the drug's active ingredient to treat IBS-D were invalid due to obviousness. Late last month, after the judge issued an oral order indicating which way he intended to rule, the stock price of Salix's parent company Bausch Health dropped more than 50%, leading to a halt in trading.