It was the stuff of which lawyers’ nightmares are made: Spend countless hours sweating over a case, prepare with painstaking care, then go into court and have the rug pulled out from under you — by none other than the U.S. Supreme Court.

Such was the situation for Victor Pribanic, an attorney from White Oak, Pa., who learned that a decision from the high Court the night before he was to go to trial meant his age discrimination case was, at least in federal court, dead in the water.