I’m going to out myself: I’ve been bleaching my hair since I was in junior high and first got my hands on a bottle of Sun In. (Women of my generation will nod knowingly.) It turned my hair vaguely orange and gave it the texture of straw, but it was the start of my lifelong relationship with hair dye.

So naturally, my interest was piqued by a big-time IP battle over hair coloring technology, pitting industry giant L’Oréal and its lawyers from Paul Hastings against a tiny California start-up represented by a team from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.