Litigator of the Week Runners-Up and Shout Outs

Our first runners-up this week are the team at Proskauer Rose representing the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico. U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain, who has been overseeing Puerto Rico’s restructuring case for the past four-plus years, confirmed the plan of adjustment this week in the first territorial debt restructuring in the history of the U.S. The move comes after an eight-day confirmation hearing on the plan in November, a December 20 complaint from the board and its lawyers at Proskauer claiming that early retirement programs for public employees passed by the Puerto Rican government would violate the federal law governing the restructuring, and a settlement in that litigation filed with the court on December 27 paving the way for Swain’s sign off on the plan. (It was some holiday season at Proskauer!) The board’s legal team was led by Martin Bienenstock, Brian Rosen and Tim Mungovan, and included partners Ann Ashton, Ehud Barak, Guy Brenner, Scott Cooper, Margaret Dale, Chantel Febus, Ralph Ferrara, Michael Firestein, Mark Harris, Colin Kass, Jeffrey Levitan, Michael Mervis, Kevin Perra, Paul Possinger, Seetha Ramachandran, Lary Alan Rappaport, Jonathan Richman, John Roberts, Marc Eric Rosenthal, Dietrich Snell, Matthew Triggs, Ana Vermal and Hadassa Waxman, as well as senior counsel Julia Alonzo and Laura Stafford.

Another runner-up spot goes to a joint team from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and Morgan, Lewis & Bockius representing Oracle in its 11-year-long copyright infringement dispute with software support services company Rimini Street. Following a seven-day, in-person bench trial in September, U.S. District Judge Larry Hicks of the District of Nevada this week hit Rimini with $630,000 in sanctions finding the company ran afoul of an injunction barring it from infringing Oracle’s copyrighted software. The ruling puts Oracle in a strong position headed into a jury trial on damages scheduled to push off this fall. Oracle’s team was led by Bill Isaacson and Jessica Phillips at Paul Weiss and Ben Smith and Sharon Smith at Morgan Lewis and includes Morgan Lewis litigation partners Zack Hill and Corey Houmand, of counsel Lindsey Shinn and associates Jacob Minne, Jenna Stokes and Nina Dutta; and Paul Weiss associates Gabriel Schlabach, Marco Minichiello, Erica Spevack and Kirsten Dedrickson.