Contract & Commercial

For more than a decade, we have represented the San Diego County Water Authority in litigation against the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD), the regional water wholesaler for most of Southern California. We have led them through three separate trials, and represented them in three separate appeals, resulting in more than $100 million in recovered damages, interest and attorneys’ fees, plus legal victories that have provided more than $1 billion in long-term benefit to the Water Authority.

To seize control of the Koret Foundation, Susan Koret, chair and wife of foundation founder Joseph Koret, filed suit against the Koret Foundation and six of the seven other board members, seeking their removal. On behalf of the foundation and its directors, we sought Ms. Koret’s removal as a director by way of a cross-complaint. A San Francisco Superior Court trial resulted in a tentative ruling rejecting Ms. Koret’s claims and granting the Foundation’s request that Ms. Koret be removed, and the parties settled the dispute on terms favorable to the Foundation.

We convinced a Massachusetts federal judge to nix a False Claims Act lawsuit against our client Genentech Inc. along with Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp. The relators accused the companies of off-label marketing and providing kickbacks to sell an asthma drug.

This case involved a breach of warranty claim for personal navigation chips and software that Broadcom sold to TomTom. The case arose when a bug failed to account for the leap year, which resulted in all devices with that chip failing. Broadcom acknowledged the defect, but claimed the software, not hardware was to blame. TomTom had agreed to a waiver on software defects in its purchase agreement and terms of sale. TomTom claimed it was a hardware defect, and therefore not under the warranty. We filed a motion for summary judgment which was partially granted. Moreover, the judge agreed with our key argument: that the product failure resulted from a software defect. In so doing, we made TomTom vulnerable to losing at trial, which, combined with the attack on their damages theory, brought the case into a viable settlement. On the eve of trial, we reached a favorable settlement.

On behalf of a real estate brokerage firm and several of its subsidiaries, we successfully moved to dismiss RICO claims relating to the valuation and sale of real estate, and successfully defended that victory before the Ninth Circuit, which upheld the dismissal without leave to amend in a published opinion.

Our client's former CEO threatened litigation over his termination and the conversion of his equity interests in the company. On behalf of the company, we sought declaratory relief in arbitration. The former CEO brought counterclaims seeking more than $100 million in damages. Following a three-week hearing, the arbitrator granted our client's request for declaratory relief and dismissed all counterclaims, finding for our client on every disputed legal and factual issue.

We served as lead counsel for Relator Robert Baker in a qui tam False Claims Act case against Community Health Systems. This case alleged the defendants manipulated the Medicaid funding program by a scheme which resulted in the illegal receipt of federally funded Medicaid payments. Our client sought the maximum amount allowed to a qui tam plaintiff and the United States sought to recover damages and civil penalties from the defendants, arising from false and/or fraudulent statements, records, and claims of FCA violations. Community Health Systems eventually agreed to end the litigation with a settlement of $75 million.

We won a complete defense judgment in favor of McKesson after a month-long trial of a qui tam action alleging violations of the False Claims Act and Anti-Kickback Statute. The trial victory allowed McKesson to avoid paying nearly $1 billion in fines, and to avoid the collateral penalties that government agencies can impose on companies found to have paid illegal kickbacks. The Justice Department’s complaint charged McKesson with paying kickbacks to a nursing home operator in the form of underpriced services, and with submitting “legally false claims” to the government. After we had the whistleblower dismissed, a key victory, we then won dismissal of related claims that the nursing home’s supplier subsidiary failed to comply with Medicare supplier standards. With the case’s scope significantly narrowed, we led our client through a bench trial which featured 24 witnesses, hundreds of exhibits and post-trial briefing. The judge ruled in our client’s favor, vindicating McKesson and its employees. This victory was listed by the National Law Journal as one of the year's five most significant trial wins.

We defended Paramedics Plus from American Medical Response’s (AMR) claims of anticompetitive unfair business practices. After losing the competitive bidding process for Alameda County’s emergency medical services transportation contract to its much smaller rival Paramedics Plus, AMR accused our client of violating California's predatory pricing law, Business & Professions Code Section 17043, in its bid to win the 911 ambulance contract. Despite a minimal amount of precedent, we were able to preserve the statute’s intent, which is to safeguard healthy competition by protecting smaller companies from larger rivals. We received a unanimous 12-0 jury verdict in favor of our client.

We represented Univision, the country's leading Spanish language television network, in a breach of contract jury trial. Televisa, a Mexican multimedia conglomerate which supplied Univision with its most popular Spanish language programs, attempted to terminate a long-term exclusive licensing agreement and sought more than $100 million in damages. The case was settled during trial on favorable terms. We also represented Univision in a bench trial which sought declaratory judgment to prevent Televisa from broadcasting over the Internet the same highly popular programs that it exclusively licensed to Univision. We won a complete victory at trial.