High-Stakes Litigation

Orrick is often on a very short list of firms considered for “bet the company” litigation. These cases include fast-moving injunction proceedings, mass tort and product liability cases requiring national coordination and strategy-setting, high-damages cases susceptible to pre-trial disposition on motion, and significant appeals. To meet these challenges, we offer litigators who are both accomplished advocates in the courtroom and skilled in scientific, accounting, financial, and other disciplines. Some of our more notable, high-stakes engagements in the last few years have been for these clients:

• Wyeth. An Orrick team serves as national counsel for Wyeth in over 250 product liability cases involving claims that childhood vaccines containing thimerosal have caused the development of “autistic-spectrum disorders” in some vaccinated children. Orrick has won product liability cases for Wyeth (formerly known as American Home Products Corporation) involving the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) vaccine, prescription drugs and OTC products, including having obtained a defense verdict as lead trial counsel in the trial of the first case involving alleged neurological injuries from the use of the Norplant System, a contraceptive implant, in Ramirez v. Wyeth Laboratories.
• The Dow Chemical Company. Orrick’s longstanding relationship with this company includes the formulation of an overall strategy for addressing asbestos-related claims asserted against Dow Chemical as well as its Union Carbide subsidiary. As part of this, Orrick is national counsel for the Union Carbide “Calidria” (an asbestos fiber that Union Carbide mined and milled in California from 1964 to 1985) cases. In addition, Orrick represented Dow Chemical nationally in litigation arising out of breast implants manufactured by Dow Corning Corporation and assisted Dow Chemical with its overall strategy to resolve its breast implant litigation docket.
• Advanced Micro Devices. In AMD v. Hyundai America, we obtained for the plaintiff, and successfully defended in appellate writ proceedings, a preliminary injunction claimed by defendants to be the first “inevitable misappropriation” injunction ever issued in California. This trade secrets and employee raiding case involved AMD’s “flash memory” semiconductor technology.
• The Mead Corporation. In June 2001, Orrick won a victory for The Mead Corporation in the landmark United States Supreme Court decision, United States v. Mead Corp., No. 99-1434. The Government brought the appeal from a Federal Circuit ruling that the United States Customs Service had been unreasonable in changing its classification of Mead’s “day planners” from a duty-free classification to a 4%-tariff classification. The Government argued that under existing Supreme Court precedent, the Federal Circuit should have given Customs’ classification the force and effect of law. But Orrick convinced the Supreme Court to hold that courts cannot reflexively grant “controlling weight” deference to an agency’s interpretation of the law that the agency is charged to administer, and rather, that courts are to give the agency’s interpretation “a respect proportionate ‘to its power to persuade.’” The Mead decision will have a far-reaching effect on the authority of federal agencies in interpreting the law: it gives the non-government party to an administrative action or litigation more leeway to challenge the agency’s position.