Things didn’t look so good for Irell & Manella client CBS Corp. when it was sued by a would-be class of music owners in 2015. They demanded hundreds of millions of dollars for unauthorized broadcast of their pre-1972 sound recordings. Sirius XM and Pandora Media had settled similar litigation for about $400 million.

“I think the plaintiffs’ expectation was they wouldn’t be litigating it, that we’d be settling,” says Irell partner Robert Schwartz.