Federal pre-emption, once an eye-glazing and rarely discussed topic, is now front and center on the Supreme Court's business docket — including two cases argued in the just-completed November argument cycle.

Ambac and its fellow bond insurer MBIA went hard at banks, accusing them of fraudulently obtaining insurance policies on subprime-backed securities. But so far, the litigation doesn't seem to have been a smashing success for the insurers.

TiVo and its lawyers at Irell & Manella and McKool Smith have secured yet another settlement in their patent litigation campaign against the digital television industry. The latest TiVo foe to cut a deal is Google's Motorola Mobility unit, which faced a jury trial next week in East Texas.

An East Texas jury called the latest round for Applied Medical in a long-running battle with Covidien and its subsidiaries over patents for surgical devices called laparoscopic trocars.

The proposed $7.2 billion class action settlement over credit card "swipe fees"—which would be the largest private antitrust settlement in history—has survived an initial hurdle. At a Friday hearing in U.S. district court in Brooklyn, Judge John Gleeson preliminarily approved the deal.

Banner Supply Company cut the first major deal with plaintiffs so far in the multidistrict litigation over defective Chinese drywall on Tuesday. It took the opportunity to bash another defendant, Knauf, for allegedly lying about the safety and fitness of drywall it sold to Banner.

Less than a week after Verizon threw its weight behind Samsung in its infringement fight with Apple and called for all the combatants in the smartphone patent wars to quit seeking injunctions against each other's products, another major wireless carrier has entered the fray.

The proposed settlement still leaves the country's largest fresh egg producer and its lawyers at Gibson Dunn fighting price-fixing claims from indirect purchasers and opt-out direct action plaintiffs.

Following Google's $5 million patent trial loss last month to Bedrock Computer Technology, it took a jury in the same Tyler, Texas courtroom just 40 minutes to reach a verdict of non-infringement on Tuesday in Bedrock's case against Yahoo over the same patent.