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.
