Our first runners-up this week are trial lawyers at Bracewell who were led by Sean Gorman along with Christopher Dodson. After a two-week bench trial in March, U.S. District Judge Gray Miller in Houston sided with Bracewell’s client BMC Software Inc. and awarded a whopping $1.6 billion in damages in a breach of contract suit against IBM Corp. BMC alleged that IBM fraudulently induced it to sign a 2015 licensing agreement and used its access to the company’s proprietary mainframe software to horn in on its relationship with longstanding customer AT&T. Miller concluded IBM entered the agreement “with no intention whatsoever of performing thereunder” to “exercise rights without paying for them, secure other contractual benefits, and ultimately acquire one of BMC’s core customers.” The judge concluded: “IBM’s conduct vis-à-vis BMC offends the sense of justice and propriety that the public expects from American businesses.” The award included $717 million in actual damages, $168 million in interest and $717 million in punitive damages. The Bracewell trial team also included Andrew Zeve, Jeff Oldham, Timothy Geiger, Jeremy Dunbar, Kyle Mason, Drewe Molin, Matthew Reasoner, Walter Simons and Cole Thoms.
Also nabbing a runner-up spot this week is a team at Debevoise & Plimpton led by IP litigation chair David Bernstein and counsel Jared Kagan that got a ruling allowing Grubhub to continue using a logo featuring a house with a fork and knife inside. Despite a magistrate judge’s prior recommendation to enter a preliminary injunction against Grubhub, U.S. District Judge Charles Norgle in Chicago last week found that Kroger hadn’t shown it was likely to succeed on its claims that the Grubhub logo infringed the trademark for its Home Chef brand meal kits and refrigerated meals. The Debevoise team on the matter also included partner Megan Bannigan and associates Matthew Petrozziello and Samuel Allaman with co-counsel Isaac Colunga of Ice Miller and Jordan LaVine of Flaster/Greenberg.
