We represented Ortho-McNeil, a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary, in a unanimous victory that made an important new law narrowing “manifest disregard of the law” almost to the vanishing point as a ground for district court vacatur of arbitral awards.  Some courts have treated this ground as a freestanding warrant to vacate arbitral awards for purported legal error even though it falls outside the statutory criteria in the Federal Arbitration Act.  The Seventh Circuit flatly rejected such an approach, reversing the district court’s partial vacatur of the award and remanding for full confirmation of an award that favored Ortho in a dispute over inventorship and ownership of two patent families relating to new biological drugs for the production of red blood cells—products potentially worth billions of dollars in annual sales.