Four years after the Supreme Court landed the second part of its one-two punch in Twombly and Iqbal, we caught up with the lawyer whose civil rights case on behalf of a Pakistani detainee ultimately changed the face of pleading-stage litigation.

In a dispute that provides a case study in patent litigation after the enactment of the America Invents Act, lawyers for a patent holder suing major tech firms are fighting to get cases that were sent to the defendants' home jurisdictions transferred back to the Eastern District of Texas—but this time designated as multidistrict litigation.

Did Barclays dupe Lehman's bankruptcy court judge and scheme its way to a megabucks windfall when it bought Lehman's broker-dealer business in Sept. 2008? Or did the Lehman estate fling unfounded after-the-fact accusations at its white knight? The two sides make their last, best case before Judge James Peck.

Citing a forum selection clause in the companies' licensing agreement, Eli Lilly's lawyers at Morgan Lewis urged the Federal Circuit to nix the transfer of its patent case against Genentech to a new federal judge with strong IP chops.