Top runners-up honors this week go to defense teams at Davis Polk & Wardwell and Ridley, McGreevy & Winocur that secured the dismissal of criminal charges against the last two remaining individual defendants in the government’s long-running probe of alleged price-fixing in the market for broiler chickens. The government agreed to drop charges against former Pilgrim’s Pride employees Jason McGuire and Timothy Stiller after U.S. District Judge Daniel Domenico in Denver last week found most of the government’s evidence inadmissible since prosecutors had not sufficiently proven the existence of the charged conspiracy. The defense teams essentially converted the pre-trial briefing and hearing dealing with the application of the hearsay exception to statements by alleged co-conspirators into a criminal summary judgment motion. “The government has shown that the alleged co-conspirators shared pricing information in advance of bids, but this alone is insufficient to prove a conspiracy,” wrote Domenico in excluding the 294 proposed exhibits. The Davis Polk team representing McGuire included partners D. Jarrett Arp, Tatiana Martins, Greg Andres, Paul Nathanson and Uzo Asonye; counsel Matthew Cormack; associates Isaac Gelbfish, Matthew Vasilakos, Dan Peck, Kate Mathews, Kyle Victor, Leigh Brinkerhoff, Kevin Sette, Laixin Li, Kelsey Roth, Benjamin Miller and Meghan Patzer; and legal assistants Christine Jegarl and Emily Turner. The Ridley, McGreevy & Winocur team representing Stiller included partners Kristen Frost and Patrick Ridley, and of counsel Robert Fishman.
Runners-up honors also go to Shearman & Sterling partners Ryan Shores, Todd Stenerson and Adam Schwartz who helped defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton fend off a challenge from DOJ’s Antitrust Division to the company’s $440 million acquisition of tech company EverWatch. In a decision made public last week, U.S. District Judge Catherine Blake in Baltimore found the government was attempting to “gerrymander” its way to a market definition applicable to a single NSA procurement. Blake’s ruling comes after a two-day evidentiary hearing before Blake in September, which itself came at the end of 10-week blitz by the Shearman team to conduct document discovery, 15 fact and expert depositions and motions practice alongside EverWatch’s counsel at Latham & Watkins.
