Our first runner-up this week is Roy Black, a senior partner at Black, Srebnick, Kornspan & Stumpf, who last week won the first trial acquittal for a defendant in the government's Varsity Blues probe into elite college admissions practices. A Boston federal jury last week found Black's client, Amin Khoury, not guilty of all charges after he was accused of making an illegal $180,000 payment to a Georgetown University tennis coach to get his daughter onto the team and into the school. The acquittal comes after 54 guilty pleas and two prior jury convictions in earlier Varsity Blues cases. Black made the case that his client was the target of a concerted fundraising effort by the school and that the federal government had no place policing the schools, which he said in his opening were private businesses with no tax dollars at stake. Howard Srebnick of Black's firm also handled witnesses at trial. Khoury had additional counsel from Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo.

Also getting a runner-up spot this week is a team at Baker & Hostetler led by IP partners Leif Sigmond Jr. and Mike Gannon. In a patent infringement case involving wind turbine technology, a 10-person federal jury in Boston found that General Electric infringed claims of one of the two patents being asserted by the firm's client, Siemens Gamesa. Jurors awarded the maximum requested running royalty rate of $30,000 per megawatt, which is estimated to work out to more than $60 million. The Baker & Hostetler team also includes Daniel Goettle, Jason Hoffman, Cy Walker, Stephanie Hatzikyriakou, Stephanie Nelson and Elizabeth Sneitzer. Siemens Gamesa is also represented by local counsel Cory Bell of Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner.

Runners-up honors also go to a Latham & Watkins team including partners Max Grant, Clem Naples, Greg Sobolski and Lawrence Gotts; counsel Thomas Yeh; associate Brett Sandford and counsel Dale Chang. The Latham team brought home a $10.75 million damages verdict last week for client Philip Morris International in a patent infringement trial over vaping technology against R.J. Reynolds Vapor. As my colleague Scott Graham noted in his "Skilled in the Art" briefing, the Latham team had to be adaptable in the runup to trial in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. The case was reassigned to U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema due to U.S. District Judge Liam O'Grady's unavailability and co-plaintiff Altria settled the day before openings, leaving the case with fewer asserted patents and a shorter witness list than originally planned.