Jan. 7, 2022

Good morning. Today, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear two major cases challenging the Biden administration’s bid to impose COVID-19 vaccination requirements on tens of millions of U.S. workers. Plus, a federal judge has ordered “expeditious” disclosure of FDA vaccine licensure records, and the 5th Circuit is set to hear new arguments over the Texas law that effectively bans abortions in the state. And see which law firm worked on the most global M&A transactions last year. It’s the first Friday of 2022!

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U.S. Supreme Court to weigh Biden vaccine mandates

REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

The U.S. Supreme Court this morning will hear from six lawyers in two cases contesting the Biden administration’s power to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for large businesses and healthcare workers.

The cases are the first tests of the federal government's authority to issue its own vaccine mandates, our colleague Lawrence Hurley reports. The large employer rule would require businesses with more than 100 employees to be vaccinated or tested weekly. The other mandate applies to a majority of the estimated 10.3 million Americans who work in healthcare facilities.

The challengers in both cases contend the U.S. has overstepped its authority. Lehotsky Keller’s Scott Keller will argue for a coalition of business groups against the large-employer mandate. Louisiana solicitor Elizabeth Murrill and Missouri’s Jesus Osete will take on the healthcare vaccination rule. U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and her top deputy, Brian Fletcher, will represent the federal government.

Read why lawyers think the healthcare mandate might have the best chance at surviving Supreme Court review.

Industry buzz

A juror in the Ghislaine Maxwell case whose actions prompted the British socialite's lawyer to seek a new sexual abuse trial has turned to New York attorney Todd Spodek, whose clients have included an NBA player, an Alec Baldwin stalker and a scammer who posed as a wealthy heiress. (Reuters)
A report by a Congressional watchdog agency has found widespread security deficiencies in federal courthouses nationwide, with four in ten courthouses ranked poorly. (Reuters)
The Federal Aviation Administration has tapped Marc Nichols, a former legal counsel for Rolls-Royce and an executive for Swedish-based defense technology company Saab, to serve as the agency’s chief counsel. (Reuters)
Skadden is guiding medical device maker Stryker’s nearly $3 billion deal to acquire digital care platform Vocera Communications, which tapped a team from Fenwick. (Reuters)

Number of the day:

1,083

REUTERS/Andrew Kelly

That’s how many deals Boston-founded Goodwin Procter worked on last year — the most global M&A transactions for any single firm, according to new data from Refinitiv. But last year also set a record for total M&A activity measured in dollars, with the $5.9 trillion in deals beating every year since Refinitiv began tracking in 1980. Read more about 2021’s deal boom.

Columnist spotlight

‘Paramount importance’: Judge orders FDA to hasten release of Pfizer vaccine docs. Score one for transparency. A federal judge in Texas on Thursday ordered the FDA to make public the data it relied on to license Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, roughly 75 years and four months faster than the FDA said it could take to complete a Freedom of Information Act request by a group of doctors and scientists seeking an estimated 450,000 pages of material about the vaccine. Jenna Greene writes that accelerating the release could help assuage the concerns of vaccine skeptics and convince them the product is safe. Read more about the situation.

In Jones Day v. Orrick, 9th Circuit will break ground on enforcing arbitration subpoenas. Briefing wrapped up this week in a battle between the law firm behemoths over Orrick’s refusal to comply with a subpoena in Jones Day’s arbitration against a former partner who left for Orrick. Jones Day told the 9th Circuit that siding with Orrick will defang the Federal Arbitration Act. Orrick said Jones Day’s view of the law would turn commercial arbitration into a “traveling circus.” Alison Frankel teases out the issues in the appeal, which will be heard next month.

Check out other recent pieces from all our columnists: Alison Frankel, Jenna Greene and Hassan Kanu.

"[W]e get more requests for reassignment for this particular judge than any other judge in the circuit — maybe more than for all the other judges in the circuit combined."

5th U.S. Circuit Judge Jerry Smith, weighing a bid by Kirkland appellate partner Paul Clement to reassign U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes in a competition case against Visa. Clement, representing Pulse Network, argues Hughes has revealed through court statements an aversion to antitrust plaintiffs. Hughes declined to comment. Read more about why Clement is messing with a longtime Texas judge.

What to catch up on this weekend

Coming up today

The three white men convicted in November in Georgia state court for chasing and fatally shooting Ahmaud Arbery face their sentencing hearing. Arbery, a Black man, was killed as he ran through the defendants’ neighborhood last year. A Georgia jury rejected a self-defense claim in a trial that probed divisive issues of race and guns in America. The defendants were convicted on charges including murder, aggravated assault and false imprisonment, and they face a minimum sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole. Their defense lawyers said they will appeal.
U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon in Manhattan is expected to decide whether Purdue Pharma can immediately appeal her Dec. 16 ruling reversing a bankruptcy court's approval of the company’s opioid litigation settlement and legal protections it provided the Sackler family members that own the company. McMahon’s ruling last month said the New York bankruptcy court that approved the $4.5 billion settlement did not have the power to protect Sackler family members, a key element of Purdue’s reorganization.
The Texas law imposing a near-total ban on abortion will return to the 5th Circuit for oral argument, as Judges Edith Jones, Stuart Duncan and Stephen Higginson hear oral arguments over whether the Texas Supreme Court should take up a question about its enforcement. The federal appeals court split 2-1 in setting an argument date, with Higginson asserting it was unnecessary and delays litigation in the U.S. district court over the constitutionality of the law. The U.S. Supreme Court last month left the law’s strict provisions in place while ruling that clinics could pursue a challenge. Lawyers for the clinics will urge the appeals court to immediately send the case back to the trial court for further proceedings there.

Court calendars are subject to last-minute docket changes.

In the courts

Debevoise client Snap has sued the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Los Angeles federal court over the agency’s refusal to grant federal trademark protection for the company's Spectacles smart glasses. The complaint said the PTO's Trademark Trial and Appeal Board was wrong to find that "Spectacles" is a generic term for smart glasses. (Reuters)
An Italian man pleaded not guilty in Manhattan to charges he stole unpublished manuscripts of hundreds of authors by impersonating editors and agents. Filippo Bernardini orchestrated the thefts, documented in a New York magazine article entitled “The Spine Collector,” for five years, according to prosecutors. (Reuters)
A panel of three state Superior Court judges in Raleigh, North Carolina, is expected to rule Tuesday in a legal battle over whether the state’s new congressional map illegally favors Republicans over Democrats. The case is one of several lawsuits that could influence who controls the U.S. Congress after this year's midterm elections. (Reuters)
A California state judge has ruled that a $1 billion luxury resort and residential project near Sacramento failed to adequately plan for the risks wildfires pose should residents need to evacuate. Judge J. David Markham ordered the county to set the plans aside in response to a lawsuit brought by the Center for Biological Diversity, rejecting arguments from the developer’s counsel at Coblentz Patch Duffy & Bass that the environmental impact had been studied comprehensively. (Reuters)
At a hearing, Maricopa County, Arizona Superior Court Judge John Hannah hit Cyber Ninjas with a $50,000-a-day fine if it fails to turn over documents related to its work reviewing the state’s election on behalf of local Republicans. The company is the subject of a lawsuit filed by The Arizona Republic newspaper over the records, which Cyber Ninjas says it can’t afford to look for. (AP)

Industry moves

Holland & Hart veteran Alison Johnson has rejoined Wilson Sonsini’s corporate practice as a partner in the firm’s new Salt Lake City office. (Reuters)
Manatt has hired entertainment lawyer Christopher Chatham, who leaves a small firm he founded and ran in Los Angeles. (Reuters)
Womble Bond Dickinson has continued to expand its patent prosecution and litigation group with the addition of Fabio Marino, who most recently chaired Polsinelli’s intellectual property and technology litigation practice. (Reuters)
Former Chicago federal prosecutor Timothy Storino has joined Dentons’ litigation practice as partner. (Dentons)
Lowenstein Sandler added Christopher Gerold as a securities litigation partner based in Roseland, New Jersey. Gerold earlier served as chief of the New Jersey Bureau of Securities. (Lowenstein)
Duane Morris has brought on Richard Marshall as a real estate partner based in the firm’s Dallas office. Marshall earlier was a partner at Conner & Winters. (Duane Morris)
McGuireWoods added Kevin Frankel, a former New York assistant attorney general, to its financial services litigation practice in San Francisco. (McGuireWoods)

Lawyer speak: Clinically integrated networks — improving health care while reducing costs

A burgeoning style of health care that puts primary care physicians and specialists into a single network provides benefits both in terms of streamlined care and billing, write Brian Higgins and Darren Skyles of Frost Brown Todd. Read more about these clinically integrated networks and what they mean for the health care system.

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