Sanya Sukduang, Jonathan Davies and Brittany Cazakoff of Cooley saw the stock price of their client Liquidia Technologies soar 44% after the Federal Circuit solidified their win clearing a way for regulatory approval of the company's new drug to treat high blood pressure in the lungs. The appellate court this week upheld a decision by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board invalidating a patent that rival United Therapeutics was asserting against Liquidia. The court found "substantial evidence" that two scientific abstracts that Liquidia contended made the claims of United's patent obvious were publicly available. 

Litigators from Covington & Burling and Shearman & Sterling helped lead the fight against class certification in a case accusing some of the largest banks in the world of conspiring to artificially inflate the spreads in the market for interest rate swaps. U.S. District Judge Judge Paul Oetken in Manhattan last week found that plaintiffs failed to persuasively rebut the banks' contention that large numbers of the relevant trades in the alleged conspiracy involved no harm "because they were executed at spreads that were less than or equal to zero." The Covington team representing JPMorgan was led by Rob Wick, John Playforth and Andrew Lazerow and included Carol Weiland and Brandon Gould. The Shearman team representing Bank of America was led by Adam Hakki, Rich Schwed and Michael Mitchell. The Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison team representing Citibank was led by Ken Gallo and Roberto Gonzalez. The Jones Day team representing Deutsche Bank was led by Eric Stephens and Tracy Schaffer. The Goldman Sachs team was led by Rick Pepperman of Sullivan & Cromwell and Rob Sperling and Staci Yablon of Paul Weiss.

Allyson Ho, Michael Raiff and Elizabeth Kiernan of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher spearheaded the briefing effort on behalf of Texas power generators who knocked out personal injury and property claims stemming from Winter Storm Uri. The First Court of Appeals in Houston last week took the rare step of granting the defendants' request for mandamus relief, reversing a trial court that had allowed the claims to survive a motion to dismiss. "If we created a new duty for wholesale power generators to supply continuous electricity to the grid, and ultimately to the retail customers, we would upend the carefully-crafted framework that the Legislature has implemented," wrote Chief Justice Terry Adams. More than 35 firms representing more than 200 wholesale power generators joined in the briefing.