Appellate courts are often where multibillion-dollar damages awards go to die.

But that wasn’t the case for this week’s Am Law Litigation Daily Litigators of the Week, Theodore Boutrous, Samuel Liversidge, and Rod Stone of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. The appellate team got their firm’s landmark $3 billion win for Hewlett-Packard Co. to stand up at the California Court of Appeal this week in a case against Oracle Corp. As you’ll see in the Q&A below, the story of how these once business partners became litigation rivals is almost Shakespearean.