Litigator of the Week Runners-Up And Shout Outs

Our first runners-up this week are Amanda Halter, Deborah Baum and their team Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman who secured a ruling eliminating more than a half billion dollars in potential liability for client Teck Cominco Metals in a long-running environmental suit. The state of Washington and the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation have been pursuing claims related to discharges from the company’s Trail, British Columbia smelter along the Upper Columbia River and Lake Roosevelt for two decades, including claims for “tribal service loss” brought under the Comprehensive, Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act. But this week Chief U.S. District Judge Stanley Bastian of the Eastern District of Washington granted Teck summary judgment on those rarely litigated claims. “Neither the statute nor the regulations reference a cultural or tribal ‘connection’ or ‘relationship’ with a particular resource, let alone possible recovery from loss or damage to that connection or relationship,” the judge wrote. The Pillsbury team also includes Ashleigh Myers, Cynthia Robertson and Jillian Marullo. 

A Davis Polk & Wardwell team led by Jim Rouhandeh and Neal Potischman and a Jones Day team led by James Gauch fought off a class certification bid in a case where their clients—Novo Nordisk and Sanofi-Aventis respectively—stood accused of inflating the price of insulin products. In a 120-page opinion this week U.S. District Judge Brian Martinotti of the District of New Jersey denied the plaintiffs’ bid to certify a national class of consumers, as well as a proposed multiple-state class and various individual state classes. The judge found that the plaintiffs couldn’t show an ascertainable loss and that individual questions predominated—including whether individual plaintiffs were insured, the terms of any insurance coverage, and whether they benefited from any of the rebates passed down through pharmacy benefit managers or insurers. Davis Polk’s Rouhandeh and Jones Day’s Gauch argued the class certification motion for the defendants. The Davis Polk team representing Novo Nordisk also includes counsel Andrew Yaphe, David Toscano, Cristina Rincon, associates Elaine Andersen, Chui-Lai Cheung, Tiffany Chung-Arzeno, Andrei Gribakov Jaffe, Michael Haney, Ian Hogg, Jennifer Kim, Natalie Stoecklein, Keon Zemoudeh, legal assistants Felicia Yu, Eric Wagner, and paralegal administrative assistant Bruno Silva.