First up, Elliot Friedman, David Livshiz and Paige von Mehren and their team at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer get runners-up honors for scoring a major arbitration win for long-time firm client London Stock Exchange Group plc and its subsidiary FTSE International Limited against Cürex Index Data Systems LLC. Curex was seeking 50% of the revenue generated by a foreign exchange reference rate product LSEG acquired as part of its 2021 acquisition of Refinitiv claiming the offering violated a non-compete agreement between Curex and LSEG as part of a deal to produce foreign exchange indices. But after a two-week evidentiary hearing last year, an arbitration tribunal in February sided with LSEG on Curex’s $500 million claim, as well as its claim to a perpetual annuity on the disputed product. The ruling was made public last week as LSEG petitioned a federal court in Manhattan for enforcement of more than $11.5 million in attorney fees and costs awarded by the arbitration panel. The Freshfields team also included Nate Hembree, Noelle Williams, Yulia Dernovsky, Becca Berman and Paola Reynoso in New York, and Simon Priddis, Martin McElwee, Jenny Leahy and Nick English in London.
Sandra Rappaport and her team at Hanson Bridgett also take home runners-up honors for defending Leprino Foods Co., the world’s largest mozzarella cheese maker, in a class action trial brought on behalf of workers at the company’s plant in Lemoore, California. After a four-week trial and a little more than four hours of deliberations, a federal jury in Fresno last week found plaintiffs who were seeking more than $100 million hadn’t shown the company had a facility-wide policy requiring workers to be on-call during rest breaks or meal breaks. The trial team also included Hanson Bridgett partner Lisa Pooley and associate Winston Hu.
