The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit against pharmaceutical companies accused of violating antitrust laws by using reverse payments to delay entry of a generic version of a...more
A new California law, Preserving Access to Affordable Drugs, AB-824 (the Act), which is aimed at curbing reverse-payment patent settlements, took effect on January 1. The Act codifies a presumption that any transfer of value...more
On October 7, 2019, California became the first state to enact legislation—Assembly Bill 824 ("AB 824")—rendering certain pharmaceutical patent litigation settlement agreements presumptively anticompetitive. This alert...more
This past year has seen renewed challenges to reverse payment settlement agreements in the pharmaceutical industry. Since the Supreme Court’s Actavis decision in mid-2013, potentially anti-competitive agreements are...more
On October 26, the Boston Patent Law Association will host a panel featuring Judge William Young to discuss the legal landscape following the Supreme Court’s 2014 opinion in Actavis v. FTC...more
Third Circuit has previously ruled that non-cash payments to settle patent litigation may violate antitrust laws. On November 7, 2016, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the petition of...more
On November 7, 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review an appeal from a Third Circuit decision finding that a settlement between GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (Teva) involving the...more
On August 8, the District of Connecticut issued a noteworthy ruling on how to approach defining the relevant market definition in a pay-for-delay suit. In In re Aggrenox Antitrust Litigation, 3:14-md-02516 (D. Conn.), three...more
Patent settlement agreements were traditionally deemed outside the purview of antitrust scrutiny unless the patent holder’s conduct fell outside the legitimate scope of the patent’s exclusionary power. This all changed when...more
On March 30 the US Federal Trade Commission filed suit in federal court alleging that settlements of patent litigation in the pharmaceutical industry in which a pioneer firm agrees not to market an "authorized generic"...more
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed an antitrust complaint this week against Endo Pharmaceuticals and several generic companies, alleging that these companies entered into anticompetitive “reverse payment” settlements of...more
Recently, the First Circuit became the second federal appellate court interpreting the Supreme Court's landmark decision in FTC v. Actavis, Inc. to hold that non-cash "reverse payments" between pioneer and generic...more
In January, the Federal Trade Commission issued a report on the terms of settlement agreements between branded and generic drug companies in ANDA litigation under the Hatch-Waxman Act, according to the provisions of the...more
Courts continue to evaluate the degree to which “reverse payments” are permitted post-Actavis. In the latest of these decisions, issued on February 22, 2016, the First Circuit held that non-cash payments may run afoul of the...more
In the first decision by a federal appeals court interpreting the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in FTC v. Actavis, the Third Circuit recently held in King Drug Co. of Florence v. SmithKline Beecham Corp. that so-called...more
On May 28, 2015, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced the settlement of its 2008 lawsuit against Cephalon, Inc. (now owned by Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Ltd.), which alleged that Cephalon had made “reverse...more
The Federal Trade Commission staff recently issued a report detailing the number of “potential pay-for-delay settlements” that took place in fiscal year 2013. The FTC is a staunch opponent of so-called “pay-for-delay”—also...more
A little more than one year ago, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis Inc. and affirmed that antitrust principles apply to reverse payment settlement agreements — those in which a brand-name drug...more
In one of the first tests of the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis, Inc. addressing the antitrust treatment of pharmaceutical patent settlements, a recent jury on Dec. 5, 2014, returned a...more
After six weeks of trial and two days of deliberation, the jury has returned its verdict in favor of the defendants in In re: Nexium. This trial began as a challenge to the allegedly anticompetitive effects of the settlements...more
As we previously reported, the In re: Nexium trial is the first pay-for-delay trial in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis decision. But if the Nexium defendants have it their way, plaintiffs’...more
Historically, contending parties have settled patent infringement cases by agreeing that the allegedly infringing party will not manufacture the product at issue during the term of the patentee's existing patent in return for...more
In two recent statements, the FTC reaffirmed its intention aggressively to pursue reverse-payment patent settlement agreements in the pharmaceutical industry. ...more
In a recent interview, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Bureau of Competition chairwoman Deborah Feinstein announced that targeting pay-for-delay arrangements by pharmaceutical companies would continue as a top priority for the...more
In FTC v. Actavis, the Supreme Court held that “reverse payment” pharma patent settlements within the scope of the patent may (or may not) violate the Sherman Act.1 The majority opinion in Actavis explained that Hatch-Waxman...more