For the antitrust bar, a judge's decision to block H&R Block's acquisition of a tax prep rival raised the intriguing prospect that a federal appellate court would be asked to rule on the merits of a DOJ merger case. It's not going to happen this time around.

Barry Ostrager, Simpson's litigation head, told us he's having a great time in his debut as a plaintiffs class action lawyer. And why not? He's winning.

Representing the Lehman estate, Jones Day claims Barclays and certain Lehman execs snookered Judge James Peck into approving last year's fire sale of the investment bank's crown-jewel brokerage business. And they're not mincing words in asking him to modify the court order approving the sale. The judge, they say, was offered a record that was "inaccurate due to mistakes, inadvertence, or misrepresentations to the court."

After two years of litigation, mountains of briefing, a grueling trial, countless hearings, and millions spent on counsel from Jones Day, the Lehman Brothers estate ended its multibillion-dollar case against Barclays on Wednesday morning in just a short paragraph.

Last summer, the government revised its standards for evaluating mergers after losing attempts to block a string of deals. The new standards were supposed to shift emphasis away from analysis of relevant markets. But in the first real test of the new guidelines, a California federal judge was more concerned with market share than the government's ideas.