Our first runner-up this week is Josh Rosenkranz of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe who scored a huge win for Gilead Sciences affiliate Kite Pharma at the Federal Circuit last week in a high-stakes patent showdown over a life-saving treatment for a form of B cell lymphoma. In the first case where the Federal Circuit heard in-person arguments in more than a year, Rosenkranz persuaded the appellate court to knock out a $1.2 billion-plus patent infringement judgment rival Juno Therapeutics previously won against Kite Pharma. The court found the underlying patent was invalid for lack of an adequate written description. Kite Pharma was also represented on appeal by a Fish & Richardson team led by Geoff Biegler and Chad Shear and co-counsel at Munger, Tolles & Olson.
Runners-up honors also go to litigators at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom who got a ruling from U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco this week denying class certification in a long-running case against their client, the National Football League. Lawyers for former NFL players claimed the league was negligent in the way it allowed teams to distribute painkillers and other prescription drugs to keep players on the field. But Alsup found the players failed to show that a single body of law could be applied to a class of players who played “for 32 different teams across 23 different states over a period of 35 years.” Alsup wrote that a trial of plaintiffs’ proposed class would become a “sprawling trainwreck.” The Akin Gump team was led by Dan Nash, and included partners Stacey Eisenstein, Greg Knopp, Nate Oleson, Pratik Shah and James Tysse; counsel Elizabeth England and Jonathan Slowik; and associate Margo Rusconi, who recently departed the firm for a judicial clerkship. The Skadden team was led by partners Jack DiCanio and Allen Ruby, who has opened his own solo shop while the case has been pending, and included counsel Caroline Van Ness and associate Niels Melius.
