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If the lawsuits were baseball games, shareholders and their lawyers trying to stop two San Antonio-based oil and gas pipeline and storage companies from merging were blown out in the first inning. Tesoro GC Charles Parrish hired Norton Rose Fulbright partner Gerry Pecht to defeat the securities litigation. He won the case before the first court hearing. Here’s the story how.

A Marble Falls maker of machine parts for the oil patch lost a closely watched trademark dispute against a rival firm when a federal judge Austin refused to invalidate the defendant’s trademark protections even thought the company’s patent on the product expired years earlier. Legal experts say Judge Spark’s ruling is one of the clearest and most straightforward court decision to state that judges must consider the validity of trademarks and patents separately, even when they involve the same product.

The Second Circuit’s recent decision in the U.S. v. Apple e-book price-fixing case highlights the usefulness of obtaining discovery of phone metadata in conspiracy cases. But phone records are not just for conspiracy cases. Coupled with simple but effective demonstratives showing the story behind the calls, phone records can provide powerful evidence in a wide range of civil cases that in-house counsel managing litigation should not ignore. But this evidence poses unique difficulties in terms of obtaining this discovery, synthesizing the results, and overcoming challenges based on privacy.