First up, a team at Munger, Tolles & Olson teamed with the Washington State Office of the Attorney General to secure a permanent injunction against the proposed $24.6 billion merger of the Kroger and Albertsons grocery chains. After a bench trial in September, King County Superior Judge Marshall Ferguson handed down his 127-page ruling blocking the deal within hours of a ruling handed down by a federal judge in Oregon siding with the Federal Trade Commission in a parallel challenge to the deal. In particular, Ferguson turned back the defendants’ challenge to the state’s authority to block the merger. “Enjoining defendants’ transaction will have effects outside Washington only because defendants structured the transaction as an all-or-nothing stock purchase deal,” the judge wrote. “Because of that structure, providing complete relief to Washington consumers necessarily requires an injunction that blocks the deal as a whole.” The team was led by Jonathan Mark of the attorney general’s office and Kuruvilla Olasa and Jonathan Kravis of Munger Tolles. The team also included Paula Pera, Amy Hanson, Miriam Stiefel, Helen Lubetkin, Valerie Balch, Ashley Locke, Jessica So and Tyler Arnold of the AG’s office, and Glenn Pomerantz, Lauren Ross, Xiaonan April Hu, Helen White, Robert Bowen, Carson Scott and Lauren Beck of Munger Tolles.

Hogan Lovells partner Jennifer Adams, Duane Morris partner Sharon Caffrey and DLA Piper of counsel Kenneth Murphy won a defense verdict for medical device maker B. Braun in a case targeting emissions of ethylene oxide, a chemical used in sterilization. The trial—the first against B. Braun in toxic tort litigation pending against the company in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas—lasted five weeks. After a little more than three hours of deliberations, jurors last week found the company was not negligent, and did not proceed to the plaintiff’s claims that the emissions caused her husband to develop leukemia. The defense team also included Hogan Lovells partner Cristina Rodriguez, senior associates Lee Whitesell and Blake Jenkins and associates Sophia Fang and Tom Greathouse, as well as Duane Morris partner Andrew Sperl and associates Leah Mintz, Coleen Hill, Sara Smith and Will Heaston.