Our first Litigator of the Week runners-up this week at Winston & Strawn scored a major appellate reversal for Cox Communications. You might remember that a team from Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr landed Litigator of the Week honors last fall for securing an injunction in Delaware Chancery Court barring Cox from partnering with anyone other than T-Mobile to offer retail wireless services. Well, so much for all that. Last week a divided Delaware Supreme Court reversed that decision and remanded the case to determine whether Cox and T-Mobile have discharged their obligations to negotiate in good faith to partner on a wireless launch as required under a settlement agreement in prior patent litigation. The decision potentially re-opens the door to a planned wireless partnership between Cox and Verizon. The Winston team brought in to handle the appeal was led by Geoffrey Eaton, who argued the case at the Delaware high court, Matthew DiRisio, Michael Elkin and Michael Stern. Cox’s team also includes Mitchell Stockwell, Joel Bush and Jeffrey Fisher of Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton and Delaware counsel Stephen Norman and Jaclyn Levy of Potter Anderson & Corroon.
Runners-up honors also go to Robert Van Kirk, the chair of the complex commercial litigation practice group at Williams & Connolly, as well as partner Kennon Poteat and associate Anne Malinee. The City of Missoula this week agreed to pay their client The Carlyle Group $4.13 million in attorney’s fees and costs as part of a global settlement in a long-running dispute over a Carlyle fund’s purchase of the private water system in the Montana city. The city claimed that Carlyle reneged on a deal to sell the utility to the city. But the Williams & Connolly team got the city’s lawsuit which, was originally filed in state court seeking hundreds of millions of dollars, routed to arbitration. An American Arbitration Association panel found last year the city lacked an enforceable verbal agreement regarding the deal.
