Lawyers for American builders and homeowners allegedly plagued by tainted Chinese drywall have spent more than two years chasing after the largest manufacturer, Taishan Gypsum Co Ltd. Those efforts may be closer to paying off, thanks to a pair of key rulings on jurisdiction. But one of the plaintiffs’ lead lawyers warned that Taishan could still pull out of the U.S. justice system at any moment.

In a long-awaited 142-page decision issued on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Eldon Fallon in New Orleans denied motions by Taishan and its lawyers at Hogan Lovells to dismiss four lawsuits brought on behalf of homeowners. Fallon, who’s overseeing nationwide multidistrict litigation over Chinese drywall, rejected Taishan’s arguments that its ties to the U.S. are insufficient to establish personal jurisdiction, and he upheld a $2.6 million default judgment he entered against Taishan in a suit brought on behalf of seven Virginia homeowners.

On Friday, meanwhile, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Joseph Farina refused to vacate a default judgment of liability that Greenberg Traurig won against Taishan for the homebuilder Lennar Corp., setting the stage for a trial on damages. Taishan had also tried to bounce that case jurisdictional grounds.

Both decisions rejected Taishan’s arguments that the company merely sold the drywall to Chinese suppliers that passed it on to U.S. customers. The judges based their rulings on facts uncovered by the plaintiffs, including evidence that Taishan sent drywall samples to U.S. companies. “The typical defense–’we were just selling to suppliers in China’–was really undermined by the factual record we developed,” said Greenberg partner Hilarie Bass, who is also lead counsel for a homebuilders’ steering committee in the New Orleans litigation.

That record was developed largely through depositions of Taishan executives in Hong Kong, Bass told us. She and other lawyers targeting Taishan have twice flown to China to take those depositions, but the first trip turned out to be disaster, according to lawyers who were there, because of uncooperative Taishan witnesses and friction with translators. The second trip apparently went much more smoothly, largely because Judge Fallon took the unprecedented step of flying to China to oversee the depositions.

The recent decisions put new pressure on Taishan to reach a global settlement with homeowners, primarily in the Southeast, who claim the Chinese-made drywall gave off noxious fumes and caused health problems. Another company that manufactured the drywall, Knauf Plasterboard Tianjin, agreed to a settlement in December 2011 that was valued at $600 to $800 million. Knauf Plasterboard is a subsidiary of the German company Knauf International Gmbh.

“Hopefully this will be a breakthrough,” said Russ Herman of New Orleans-based Herman Herman Katz & Cotlar, who serves as lead plaintiffs counsel in the MDL along with Arnold Levin of Levin Fishbein Sedran & Berman. “My hope is that we will get a peace offering, that they will sit down and say they will resolve this. . . the model for a settlement is there.”

“It’s difficult to predict what [Taishan] is going to do,” Herman added, with evident frustration. He said Taishan has dragged its feet from the start of the litigation. The company (which Herman said is owned by entities controlled by the Chinese government) long refused to appear in the case, allowing default judgments to be entered against it. It finally made an appearance in both the MDL and in state courts last summer, on the last day before the default judgments became final. Ever after hiring Hogan Lovells to fight back, the company has twice threatened to pull out of the case, Herman told us. “One option they could take is to do nothing–to retreat from the litigation and say ‘come get us in China.’”

Taishan could also try to challenge the ruling with an interlocutory appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Herman told us he hopes Taishan won’t do that, because it could delay the case another few years. Hogan Lovells partner Jospeh Cyr, who is overseeing Taishan’s defense, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “We believe that the Court was in error for all the reasons reflected in our papers and discussed at the hearing,” Cyr told Reuters in a statement.