A Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton team led by partners Lev Dassin, Roger Cooper, Rishi Zutshi and Lina Bensman takes home the top runners-up spot for their trial win for monoline insurer Assured Guaranty. During a five-week bench trial in the fall of 2021, the Cleary team squared off with lawyers for Lehman Brothers International Europe, which was seeking $485 million dollars related to the valuation of certain credit default swaps during the financial crisis in July 2009. "At that point in time, the markets were so disrupted that accurate market prices were non-existent," wrote New York Supreme Court Justice Melissa Crane. The judge this week sided completely with Assured Guaranty, finding its valuation "was commercially reasonable and in good faith" and that LBIE's proposed valuation "relied entirely on market prices its experts constructed for this litigation." The Cleary team also included associates Daniel Montgomery, Tabitha Cohen, Drew Kramer, Jonathan Jaroslawicz, Tom Mintz, Xu Yang, Laura Harder and John Mucciolo, senior discovery attorney Jennifer Levy, and staff attorney Ashley Graham.

Runners-up honors also go to J. Scott McBride, Nevin Gewertz, Rebecca Horwitz and Meg Fasulo of Bartlit Beck for defending Gilead's blockbuster hepatitis C drugs from patent infringement claims. The Federal Circuit this week upheld the firm's win alongside co-counsel at Venable in an inter partes review at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board for Gilead, invalidating all claims of a patent asserted by the Regents of the University of Minnesota against Gilead's hepatitis C treatments containing sofosbuvir.  Federal Circuit Judge Alan Lourie wrote that the university's patent, which provided multiple paths to create potential compounds, did not provide "a written description of what might have been described if each of the optional steps had been set forth as the only option." The judge continued: "This argument calls to mind what Yogi Berra, the Yankee catcher, was reported to have said: 'when one comes to a fork in the road, take it.'"

An appellate team led by Nicole Saharsky of Mayer Brown and Brian Gilpin of Godfrey & Kahn lands a runner-up spot for scoring a win for U.S. cheesemakers in a trademark scrum over the use of the name "gruyere." The Fourth Circuit this week affirmed a lower court decision turning back a legal challenge from consortiums of cheesemakers from Switzerland and France who argued the gruyere name should be considered a certification mark applicable only to cheese produced in the Gruyère region. But Chief Judge Roger Gregory wrote for the unanimous panel: "The consortiums cannot overcome what the record makes clear: cheese consumers in the United States understand 'Gruyere' to refer to a type of cheese, which renders the term generic." The team also included Minh Nguyen-Dang of Mayer Brown as well as Zachary Willenbrink and Jennifer Gregor of Godfrey & Kahn.