Our first runners-up this week are Jack DiCanio, Matthew Sloan, Emily Reitmeier and their team at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom who secured an acquittal for Chinese semiconductor company Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co. in a criminal trade secret and economic espionage case. After a bench trial that included eight weeks of testimony spread over the past two years, Senior U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney in San Francisco this week found prosecutors failed to prove that Jinhua misappropriated trade secrets from Micron Technology Inc., the largest DRAM chip maker in the U.S., via a manufacturing deal with Taiwan’s United Microelectronics Corp. UMC pleaded guilty in 2020 to receiving and possessing a stolen trade secret, brought as part of the Justice Department’s now-defunct China Initiative, and paid a $60 million fine. The defense team also included Skadden partner Christopher Gunther, and associates Christopher McKinley and Jake Meiseles.

A Hogan Lovells team led by partner Vanessa Wells represented Farmers Insurance as the company intervened in a case bringing a challenge under California civil rights statutes to the use of marital status as a rating factor in auto insurance prices. Class actions against Farmers and four other leading auto insurers seeking statutory damages for every policy and renewal where the factor was used going back to 2019 were stayed pending the outcome of plaintiffs’ writ petition against the state Insurance Commissioner challenging the underlying regulation. After a two-day hearing in December, Alameda County Superior Judge Evelio Grillo last week held “insurers are permitted to present evidence to the [insurance department] that marital status regulations are based on economic business or other factors and to argue that marital status has ‘a substantial relationship to the risk of loss.’” The Hogan Lovells team also included counsels Victoria Brown and Jordan Teti, and associate Christine Wang.