Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan breached one more line of defense this week in the Federal Housing Finance Agency's campaign against the banks at the heart of the subprime crisis.

Massachusetts Mutual and its lawyers at Quinn Emanuel crossed a major hurdle on Tuesday in a crush of litigation against banks that underwrote residential mortgage backed-securities. A federal judge in Boston largely denied motions to dismiss nine separate suits that Quinn Emanuel filed against Credit Suisse, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, UBS, WaMu Inc., and Goldman Sachs.

They say you can't beat the house. In litigation sparked by the collapse of the giant Fontainebleau casino project on the Las Vegas strip, neither the project's borrowers or a group of term lenders have been able to beat the banks.

Describing the third-party litigation financing business as "lumpy, unpredictable and high-risk," Burford Capital nonetheless announced significant increases in its financial results on Thursday.

We're beginning to reap the consequences of the sweeping Lehman examiner's report. Plaintiffs in a long-pending securities class action have now filed an amended complaint that adds allegations about Lehman's now-infamous Repo 105 balance sheet asset transfers--and adds Lehman's auditor, Ernst & Young, as a defendant.