Our first runners up this week are Sam Baxter of McKool Smith and Jason Sheasby of Irell & Manella, who won Litigator of the Week honors last August for landing a $506 million damages verdict for PanOptis after a jury in the Eastern District of Texas found that Apple had willfully infringed five patents essential to the 4G LTE wireless standard. After U.S. District Chief Judge Rodney Gilstrap ordered a retrial on damages, a separate East Texas jury hit Apple with another 9-digit damages award of $300 million this week. The trial team also included Annita Zhong, Ingrid Petersen and Andrew Strabone of Irell & Manella and Steve Pollinger, Jennifer Truelove and Jonathan Yim of McKool Smith. 

A trial team at Kirkland & Ellis led by Hariklia “Carrie” Karis, Rush Howell and Rachel Haig lands a runners-up spot this week for getting a defense win for Actavis in a case where an Illinois man was seeking more than $78 million in damages. Plaintiff Brad Martin claimed that Actavis’s testosterone replacement product Androderm caused his 2013 heart attack. But after two weeks of trial and less than an hour of deliberations, a federal jury in Chicago on Tuesday returned a complete defense verdict for Actavis. This marks the first defense victory in a testosterone replacement therapy trial involving a heart attack after two prior 9-figure verdicts.