Our first runners-up this week convinced a New Jersey appeals court to reverse a $117 million talcum powder verdict against Johnson & Johnson and Imerys Talc America. New Jersey’s Appellate Division on Wednesday found that the trial judge should not have allowed two plaintiffs’ experts to testify at trial. J&J was represented by a team at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe led by Josh Rosenkranz that included partners Bob Loeb and Naomi Scotten and associates Paul Meyer, Alyssa Barnard-Yanni, former Orrick associate Evan Rose, and John C. Garde of McCarter & English. A team from Latham & Watkins represented Imerys on appeal including partner Roman Martinez and associates Elana Nightingale-Dawson, Blake Stafford, Genevieve Hoffman, and Cherish Drain.
Also landing runners-up honors this week are Sonal Mehta, David Gringer, and Ari Holtzblatt of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr who convinced a federal judge in the Northern District of California to toss an antitrust challenge against Facebook with prejudice. U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman in San Jose on Monday tossed the plaintiffs’ claims that the company had monopolized the market for “social data” by denying third-party developers access to a set of application programming interfaces that they relied on for their mobile applications. Freeman found that the plaintiffs hadn’t sufficiently pled fraudulent concealment to toll the four-year statute of limitations for antitrust claims. The ruling follows an earlier one from Freeman last July knocking claims related to Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.
