Commercial Litigation

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In Sawstop Holding LLC v. Vidal the Federal Circuit confirmed what many practitioners suspected— the Patent and Trademark Office will only award a patent term adjustment to offset a delay caused by appellate review of a patent prosecution if the appeal results in allowable claims ready for issuance.
Continue Reading Is an Appeal Time Well-Spent? For Patents, That Depends . . .

In the United States, the scale of trade secret theft is estimated to be between $180 billion and $450 billion annually. Among the targets of this theft are pharmaceutical companies, which are some of the most research-intensive institutions in the world. Pharmaceutical research generally requires extensive work and often generates proprietary data that is pivotal to shaping pharmaceutical development. Because that data may be very attractive to threat actors, pharmaceutical companies employ various measures to protect their proprietary information, these measures may sometimes fall short. A November 2021 trade secret misappropriation suit brought by Venn Therapeutics (“Venn”) against Corbus Pharmaceuticals (“Corbus”) in the District Court for the Middle District of Florida highlights the issues that can arise despite a company’s best efforts to protect its trade secrets.
Continue Reading When Nondisclosure Agreements and Pharmaceutical Trade Secrets Intersect

The Federal Circuit’s recent ruling in MaxPower Semiconductor Inc. et al v. Rohm Semiconductor USA, LLC highlights the interplay between the liberal federal policy favoring arbitration agreements and the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (“PTAB”) authority as an agency tribunal having a broad role to protect the public interest in ensuring the quality of patents.

Challenging the validity of a patent through the inter partes review (IPR) process at the PTAB is a conventional alternative to litigating invalidity in federal court. MaxPower addressed the question of whether the PTAB will defer to an agreement to arbitrate that did not expressly preclude the parties from proceeding before the PTAB.
Continue Reading Arbitration Clause Not Binding on the United States Patent Office

Pharmaceutical drug development is expensive. One recent study estimates that the median cost to develop a new drug is $985 million, while the average is $1.3 billion. And those figures appear to be on the low end of a broad range. Others have estimated the average cost at approximately $2.5 to $3 billion, with costs increasing annually at a post-inflation rate of approximately 8.5%.
Continue Reading “Commercially Reasonable Efforts” Clauses in Drug Development Deals: What Level of Protection Do They Really Provide?

In an opinion issued on March 3, 2021, the Supreme Court of Delaware, one of the top commercial courts in the country, overturned a jury verdict that Glaxo Group Limited and Human Genome Sciences, Inc. (collectively, “GSK”) breached the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing when GSK disclaimed all the claims of a lupus treatment patent it had licensed from Biogen thereby extinguishing its obligation to pay ongoing royalties on sales of its lupus treatment drug. The court’s reasoning and the outcome raise important considerations for life sciences practitioners in the transactional, litigation, and patent disciplines.
Continue Reading Delaware High Court Allows Licensee To Stop Royalty Payments By Disclaiming Patent Claims