Let’s kick off the runners-up with Samuel Liversidge, Daniel Swanson and Thomas Hungar of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher who helped bring home a big summary judgment win for client Chevron U.S.A. Inc. and seven other refiners in California accused of conspiring to fix gas prices in the state from 2012 to present where plaintiffs were seeking tens of billions in damages. In a 103-page opinion handed down last week, U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta in San Diego concluded a reasonable jury could find refiners made “production decisions based on their own profit maximizing calculus and logistical constraints rather than pursuant to a conspiracy to reduce supply.” The judge also concluded that most communications between the codefendants that plaintiffs pointed to as evidence of collusion “do no more than illustrate that defendants watched each other closely and desired lower supply conditions to generate higher profits.” The defense line-up also included O’Melveny & Meyers for Exxon Mobil Corporation, Norton Rose Fulbright for Phillips 66, Hawxhurst LLP for Valero Marketing and Supply Co., Jones Day for Tesoro Refining & Marketing Co., Morgan Lewis & Bockius for Shell Oil Products US, Sullivan & Cromwell for BP West Coast Products LLC, and Baker & Hostetler for Alon U.S.A. Energy Inc.
A team at Fenwick & West gets runners-up honors for knocking out five video-on-demand patents that were being asserted against client Amazon Inc. by Broadband iTV Inc. U.S. District Judge Alan Albright in Waco, Texas, last week handed Amazon a summary judgment win finding BBiTV’s five patents invalid. “The Court generally credits BBiTV’s arguments that its inventor was the first to implement certain existing business practices on computer systems to make the process faster and scalable, but this alone is insufficient to transform those business practices into something more than a computer implementation of an abstract idea,” Albright wrote. The team representing Amazon includes Fenwick’s J. David Hadden, Saina Shamilov, Ravi Ranganath, Allen Wang, Todd Gregorian, Min Wu, Eric Young, Geoffrey Miller and Daniel Rabinowitz, as well as J. Mark Mann and G. Blake Thompson of Mann Tindel Thompson.
