The plaintiffs lawyers' shareholder suit over last year's leveraged buyout of Del Monte Corporation finally ended Thursday with Del Monte and Barclays agreeing to a combined $89.4 million settlement. But Grant said the case will also have a lasting change on the way big deals are financed.

Standards-essential FRAND patents were big news over the past week, as was litigation over Google's moneymaker AdWords. Plus, looking ahead to Supreme Court arguments in a case over sneakers that could leave a big footprint in patent and trademark law.

On July 20 a group of Spanish funds won a $2.6 million arbitration award that cost nearly $15 million in unawarded fees, and may well be vacated by a Swedish court. Good investment? Hell yes, from the viewpoint of the oligarchs who used to control Yukos Oil Company, and fronted the fees.

A looming trial in the case will showcase two of the country's most fearsome patent litigators — Douglas Lumish of Latham & Watkins for TransPerfect and Charles Verhoeven of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan for MotionPoint.

An army of lawyers for BP, Transocean, the DOJ and others began staking out their positions at trial on Monday in New Orleans, nearly three years after the catastrophic spill that fouled the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding coastlines.

How to choose between a record $2 billion ICSID award and a $2 billion ICC award that's also in record terrain? We've decided to throw up our hands and pronounce a tie for the 2012 Global Lawyer of the Year. We're honoring Debevoise & Plimpton's David W. Rivkin for his ICSID win in Occidental v. Ecuador, and Shearman & Sterling's Henry Weisburg, for prevailing in The Dow Chemical Company's ICC feud with Kuwait.

The Justice Department has suffered consecutive setbacks in an economic espionage case against four Chinese companies because they have no U.S. employees to serve with a summons, and no U.S. office where one can be mailed. That's why the department is hoping to eliminate certain requirements for service on foreign businesses.

The U.K. Bribery Act arrived this summer in a hail of publicity. But that act won't move mountains without a change in Britain's legal structure. "There's a real need [in the U.K.] for a middle ground between full-on criminal prosecution and civil recovery," said the former U.K. corruption prosecutor Matthew Cowie, now with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meager & Flom.