The Federal Circuit reversed a decision snuffing out Star's patents for a supposedly-safer tobacco curing method. But the appellate court refused to order a new trial, agreeing with Brinks Hofer's Ralph Gabric that R.J. Reynolds hadn't infringed

After Lundbeck Inc. bought the rights to the only two drugs used to treat a life-threatening heart condition in low-weight infants, it raised the price thirteen-fold. The Federal Trade Commission filed an antitrust suit, but lost at trial. On Friday, the Eighth Circuit affirmed, finding that the two drugs weren't in the same market because doctors didn't take price into account when choosing between them.

The Supreme Court's narrow decision in Bilski v. Kappos failed to resolve the hotly contested question of whether "business methods" are patentable. Those hoping for a more forceful ruling than Bilski got their wish on Tuesday, in the form of a Federal Circuit decision that could be used to invalidate both method patents and patents for related software.

The plaintiffs lawyers in the long-ago-settled Vioxx litigation in New Orleans are still waiting for their shares of a $315 million common benefit fund. And they haven't been waiting quietly.

Lawyers from Covington & Burling and Brune & Richard seized on the Supreme Court's ruling as soon as it was issued in June, arguing that it gutted the SEC's case accusing their clients of misleading investors about the risks of Charles Schwab's ill-fated YieldPlus fund.

Another week, another 100-page-plus state court suit over mortgage-backed securities courtesy of Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann.

A potent appellate team--including Wilmer Cutler, Covington, and Williams & Connolly--convinced the Second Circuit to toss the convictions of five former executives accused of using a sham reinsurance deal to conceal AIG's shrinking reserves. The court did reject the defense teams' wide-ranging allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, but tossed the convictions anyway, citing faulty jury instructions.

A day after a magistrate judge granted Oracle's lawyers at Boies Schiller two hours to depose Google CEO Larry Page, San Francisco federal district court judge William Alsup suggested that $100 million--not the several billion Oracle sought in damages--would be a good starting point for hypothetical royalty negotiations.

Sure, the bank can now put the Securities and Exchange Commission suit behind it. But that's hardly the end of the civil litigation Goldman faces.

Amidst IBM's merger talks with Sun, a potential deal-breaker has emerged: Sun's two-year-old patent dogfight with a Silicon Valley network storage mainstay called NetApp.