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When David C. Frederick took on the task of trying to persuade the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court that federal law preempts neither state law claims against drug makers nor claims alleging deceptive cigarette labeling by tobacco companies, there were some betting against him.

In April 2009 Iowa became the fourth state to legalize same-sex marriage when the state’s highest court ruled that a statute prohibiting gay marriage violated the constitution.

The winning lawyer, Dennis W. Johnson, was a commercial litigator who had never worked on a serious constitutional law case in his 34-year career.

Lawyers in Florida have been fighting over individual tobacco trials for more than a decade. But when cases finally started being tried this year, the verdicts ranged from just over a million to $30 million – pocket change for the tobacco industry.

That changed in November, when Robert W. Kelley won $300 million for Cindy Naugle, a 61-year-old suffering from severe emphysema.

Steven Krane, a partner at the New York office of Proskauer Rose, headed a multi-office litigation team that represented the ABA in its effort to block the Federal Trade Commission from applying its “red flags rule” to lawyers.

Under the rule, businesses that accept deferred payments from clients are required to create written policies outlining how they will prevent, detect and address identity fraud.

In June, medical malpractice attorney Randy Nassau of Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald, P.C. in Yonkers, N.Y., won the largest verdict of its kind in the history of New York’s Westchester County, a $77.4 million award to the parents of 3-year-old Diego Baizan.

Nassau admitted she hadn’t anticipated such a large verdict, despite the severity of the injuries suffered by her clients’ child.

If ever there was a judicial Cinderella story, it belongs to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

And this year, Sotomayor was tapped as President Barack Obama’s first Supreme Court pick, becoming the first Latina justice on the High Court.

She toppled the dominant player in debt arbitration in the country and changed the face of consumer credit card arbitration overnight.

Lori Swanson, Minnesota’s Attorney General, filed a consumer fraud suit against the National Arbitration Forum in July, alleging that the firm worked closely with creditors and debt collectors behind the scenes, against the interests of consumers while claiming to be a neutral forum.

The first case out of over 600 in the multi-district litigation against GlaxoSmithKline over allegations that the antidepressant Paxil causes an increased risk of birth defects ended in a victory for the plaintiff.

Sean Tracey, who practices at the Tracey Law Firm in Houston, triumphed over the drug maker in the case, representing the family of a three-year-old Pennsylvania boy who was born with a defect in his aorta that restricted blood flow to his lungs.