Our first runners-up this week are white-collar defense lawyers at Latham & Watkins who won a full acquittal this week in the fraud trial of Gary Winemaster, the former CEO and founder of Power Solutions International Inc. Winemaster went to trial on 14 criminal counts even as the company entered into a non-prosecution agreement with the DOJ last year and consented to pay a $1.7 million civil penalty to the SEC. After a four-week bench trial earlier this summer, U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman in Chicago this week found Winemaster not guilty on all 14 counts. The Latham defense team was led by partners Sean Berkowitz, John Sikora, Eric Swibel and Heather Waller, with associates Jack McNeily, Adam Rosenbloom, Kirsten Lee, Linda Qiu, Sydney Black, Greer Gaddie, Katherine Boyles and Brett Frazer. Winemaster’s co-defendants and former PSI general managers Craig Davis and James Needham were also found not guilty. They were represented by counsel at Burke, Burns & Pinelli and McGuireWoods, respectively.
Runners-up honors also go to Amgen’s legal team for prevailing in a Hatch-Waxman patent infringement suit involving Otezla, the company’s treatment for psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis that generated $2.2 billion in sales last year. U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp in New Jersey found that generic makers Sandoz and Zydus infringed several Otezla patents, the last of which is set to expire in February 2028. Amgen’s counsel included George Pappas, Jeff Elikan, Mike Kennedy, Alexa Hansen and Kevin Collins of Covington & Burling, co-counsel at Sidely Austin led by Steven Horowitz, and local counsel Charles Chevalier of Gibbons. Celgene, from whom Amgen bought Otezla, was represented by local counsel Charles Lizza and Bill Baton at Saul, Ewing, Arnstein & Lehr.
