First up, are litigators at Kirkland & Ellis and Jones Day who won a defense summary judgment ruling in the first four bellwether cases scheduled for trial in the paraquat multidistrict litigation. Chief U.S. District Judge Nancy Rosenstengel in East St. Louis, Illinois, who is overseeing the paraquat MDL, found that the plaintiffs’ general causation expert, a biostatistician and epidemiologist at Cornell University, “required several methodological contortions and outright violations of the scientific standards he professed to apply” to reach his conclusion that exposure to the herbicide increased the risk of Parkinson’s disease. The Kirkland & Ellis team representing paraquat maker Syngenta Corp. is led by Ragan Naresh, Bradley Weidenhammer, Britt Cramer and Zach Holmstead. Chevron USA, the successor to a company that sold paraquat until 1986, is represented by Sharyl Reisman and Lee DeJulius of Jones Day.
Lawyers at Irell & Manella and McKool Smith this week secured a $142 million verdict—the full amount requested—for G+ Communications in the retrial of the damages portion of a standard essential patent showdown with Samsung. Chief U.S. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap in Marshall, Texas, ordered the damages retrial because of jury instructions issues in the January trial, which had yielded a $67.5 million verdict for G+. The Irell team included Jason Sheasby, Lisa Glasser, Benjamin Manzin-Monnin, Michael Harbour and Justin Linetski, with co-counsel Jennifer Truelove of McKool Smith.
