Last week's reelection of President Barack Obama, with Democrats maintaining control of the Senate, was a blow to Republican efforts to chip away at the Dodd-Frank Act and reshape its financial reforms. For now at least, what happens next on The Hill may not be as damaging to those rules as what happens in courtrooms.

Even as new lawsuits against rulemaking continue to hit dockets, attorneys in the midst of the action insist—likely in vain, as far as the regulators they face-off against are concerned—that their efforts are neither strictly political nor a concerted effort to disassemble Dodd-Frank piece-by-piece.

Among the successful challenges to financial reform regulation was a lawsuit brought by the Business Roundtable and U.S. Chamber of Commerce against the SEC's “proxy access” rule, which would have made it easier for investors to nominate candidates for the board of directors. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, agreeing that an adequate cost-benefit analysis was lacking, vacated the rule in July 2011. In September, a federal court also put a stop to limits the Commodity Futures Trading Commission was set to impose on firms trading in certain commodity contracts (an appeal is expected).

Still awaiting resolution are challenges spearheaded by the U.S. Chamber over the disclosure “conflict minerals” (that often fund violent militias in the Congo ) in supply chains, and of payments made to governments by oil, gas, and mining companies for extraction rights. Last week, exchange operator CME Group sued the CFTC over a requirement that it report swap transaction data to potentially competing third-party swaps data repositories. Another pending suit against that regulator looks to shake off oversight of mutual funds that invest in commodities.

Jason Mendro, a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, was on the legal team that represented the International Swaps and Derivatives Association and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association during their position limits challenge. His colleague at the firm, Eugene Scalia, son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, has a 5-0 record in cases against regulators and has been the go-to attorney for the U.S. Chamber in most of their Dodd-Frank challenges (a notable exception is the action over conflict minerals disclosure).

Echoing sentiments Scalia (who declined to be interviewed) has put to paper in opinion pieces, Mendro maintains that there is no overarching political agenda at work, only an effort to ensure that sensible regulation prevails over onerous compliance burdens.

“It is natural to expect in any period of heightened regulation that you are going to see more challenges,” he says. “It's just like anything else the more times you go to the free throw line and take a shot the more times you are going to miss… The number of challenges in relation to final rules remains quite small.”

A recurring strategy in the Dodd-Frank lawsuits has been to dispute the cost-benefit analysis regulators are required to undertake. Another angle has focused on how rigidly regulators have interpreted their Congressional mandate.

CFTC commissioners, for example, “appeared to be under a misconception that they were required to adopt position limits irrespective of other mandates” and even though position limits could harm the markets they are trying to protect, Mendro says.

“There was this misconception that you had to regulate no matter what,” he says. “But what that missed is that there are other requirements that the CFTC is subject to, including the determination of whether position limits are necessary or appropriate. That just wasn't done.”

As for demands that regulators stay the effectiveness of litigated rules—something the SEC recently refused to do when it was demanded of them by opponents of the extraction payments rule—Mendro says it makes sense for them to comply if there are questions and considerable cost impacts. He concedes, however, that agencies may not want to do that “for fear that agreeing to stay will project weakness,” or “be construed as an admission that there may be problems with the regulation.”