With the Supreme Court ruling on Obama Care, much of the business world is focused on healthcare. In honor of that attention, we decided to devote several issues this summer to the big three antitrust issues in healthcare. The first issue is reverse payments, a perennial thorn-in-the-side for the FTC. For those who don’t know Cajun […]

John Bigelow, Jun 27, 2012 Cases involving pharmaceuticals settlements to patent litigation with so called “reverse payments” or, as the FTC now prefers to call them, “exclusion payments” have been a source of controversy for some time. The FTC has been fighting these agreements since 2000 on the antitrust grounds that they are agreements between […]

Anne Layne-Farrar, Jun 27, 2012 We are drawing close to the thirtieth anniversary of the Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act, better known as Hatch-Waxman, enacted in 1984. Among other things, the Act grants generic manufacturers the ability to challenge the validity of a patent covering a brand name drug without incurring the […]

Kyle Musgrove, Richard Ripley, Jun 27, 2012 In April 2012, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) suffered yet another rebuke of what FTC Chair Jon Leibowitz has characterized as “one of the Commission’s top competition priorities,” i.e., stopping “reverse payment” settlements in drug patent litigation. The Eleventh Circuit’s decision in the AndroGel case presents an opportunity to […]

Kevin Noonan, Jun 27, 2012 The Federal Trade Commission in recent years has identified a practice it considers to be a threat to consumers regarding generic drugs. This threat is posed by the practice of “reverse payments” in ANDA litigation. Typically, in these arrangements a branded drug manufacturer settles litigation with a generic challenger brought […]

Jodi Lucena-Pichardo, William Rooney, Jun 27, 2012 The Eleventh Circuit’s recent decision in Federal Trade Commission v. Watson Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (the “AndroGel” decision) addresses the latest challenge to reverse-payment settlements. The Eleventh Circuit rejected the Federal Trade Commission’s position that the lawfulness of a reverse-payment settlement depends on the perceived strength or weakness of the patent […]

William Michael, Aidan Synnott, Jun 27, 2012 For over a decade, the Federal Trade Commission has sought, with little success, to end “reverse settlement” payments among manufacturers of branded and generic pharmaceuticals. On April 25, 2012, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals dealt another blow to the FTC’s campaign against reverse settlements. In Federal Trade […]