Law360
June.17.2013
This article, about the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that brand-name drugmakers can be sued for paying generic-drug manufacturers to delay the release of low-cost versions of popular medicines, quotes intellectual property partner Rob Reznick.
"The Supreme Court's opinion is really a 'guidance' to courts and the industry, leaving a large middle ground to be resolved by the lower courts," said Reznick. "Some deals simply will not get done. But in others settling parties will move to structure plausible deals more defensively, perhaps complicating them to foil a rule of reason analysis or adding agreements in which the generic is selected to profit from deals having commercially reasonable terms that are unrelated to the patent dispute."
Reznick added: "With loose dicta on both sides of the defensibility of large settlements, whether defendants will choose to, be permitted to, or even be required to conduct a mini-trial on the strength of their patents or the reasonableness of their assumptions remains unclear. Settling parties that elect to pursue more aggressive arrangements will spend a lot of money learning the answers to these questions."