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
On May 13—and more than ten years after Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis, the leading U.S. Supreme Court case on reverse payment settlements—the Second Circuit for the first time weighed in on whether (and how) antitrust...more
In the ten years since the Supreme Court ruled in Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis that reverse payment settlements—or settlements where a patent holder pays an accused patent infringer cash or other consideration to end...more
I. Introduction - No pharmaceutical antitrust decision has had more impact than the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis, a decision which officially defined the term “reverse payment...more
On Friday, August 25, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals For The District Of Columbia Circuit affirmed dismissal of an antitrust action brought by the Federal Trade Commission regarding Endo Pharmaceuticals’s grant of an...more
The Federal Trade Commission, in coordination with the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division, recently released a summary of the Agencies’ June 2022 joint workshop titled “The Future of Pharmaceuticals: Examining the...more
For nearly a decade, the Supreme Court’s FTC v. Actavis decision has guided pharmaceutical litigators and advisors exploring the antitrust risks inherent in settling pharmaceutical patent lawsuits, especially when such...more
The Background: In the Supreme Court's landmark 2013 decision in FTC v. Actavis, the Court determined that large payments by branded drugmakers to potential generic entrants to settle patent disputes could be anticompetitive....more
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) spent the better part of a decade attacking the practice of innovator drug companies settling ANDA litigation by providing payments to generic applicants challenging the validity of Orange...more
On December 3, 2020, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published its annual report on pharmaceutical patent settlements filed with the FTC under the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003...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
2019 witnessed a number of developments in challenges to reverse-payment settlements. In its first decision on a pay-for-delay settlement since the Supreme Court’s seminal 2013 decision in FTC v. Actavis, the FTC took an...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
In recent years, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has brought a series of cases involving drug manufacturers allegedly seeking to delay competition from generic drug companies. See, e.g., F.T.C. v. Actavis, Inc., 570 U.S....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
In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered its decision in FTC v. Actavis, finding that although so-called reverse payment settlement agreements were not per se antitrust violations in cases brought against generic drug makers...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
Antitrust practitioners, enforcers and industry professionals came together in Washington, D.C. for the 64th installment of the ABA Section of Antitrust Law's annual Spring Meeting. The Spring Meeting provides a look at the...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
This alert, the title of which is adapted from a March 30, 2016 FTC Staff Attorney blog post, considers the FTC's first lawsuit challenging a so-called "no-AG" agreement. No-AG agreements are components of Hatch-Waxman...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