Persistence. Tenacity. Determination. Those characteristics came up again and again as The Recorder took stock of its 2009 Attorneys of the Year.

From Michael Bien, who’s been litigating prison rights case Coleman v. Schwarzenegger for two decades, to Peter Kerman, who spent the better part of a year negotiating Genentech Inc.’s sale to Roche Holding, to Elliot Peters, whose eight-year fight for the wrongly imprisoned John Tennison yielded a $4.6 million settlement, tenacity was a key ingredient of success.