Our first runner-up this week is a Boies Schiller Flexner team led by partner Hamish Hume. The team effectively forced this week’s shutdown of the exclusive sportsbook for the state of Florida, a significant win for clients Magic City Casino and Bonita Springs Poker Room. The D.C. Court of Appeals last week declined to stay a lower court decision from last month nixing the state’s deal giving the Seminole Tribe a 30-year monopoly on online sports betting. U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich in D.C. found the accord, which allowed anyone in the state to place sports bets through the Tribe’s “Hard Rock Sportsbook” mobile app, violated the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which limits gaming to tribal lands.
Velvel Freedman and Kyle Roche, the co-founding partners of Roche Freedman, and Boies Schiller partner Andrew Brenner score a runner-up spot this week for getting a $100 million verdict from a federal jury in Miami last week in a closely-watched dispute springing from the cryptocurrency world. The jury stopped short of awarding their client cryptocurrency valued at $50 billion that they claimed was stolen by defendant Craig Wright, an Australian man who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin. But the jury did side with their client W&K Info Defense Research on a conversion claim tied to blockchain-related technology and denied all of Wright’s affirmative defenses. The team also included Joe Delich, Stephen Lagos and Bill Dzurilla from Roche Freedman and Max Pritt, Alex Holtzman, Laselve Harrison and Sam Licata from Boies Schiller.
