Drug Companies Reserving Seat for Patent Lawyers at Deal Table

Pharmaceutical companies looking for the next blockbuster drug increasingly view patent litigators as a secret weapon at the bargaining table, proving their value to an industry built on intellectual property and dealmaking.

The trend of IP litigators as strategic business advisers has grown over the past decade, as brand-name drugmakers look to them for help in determining what types of deals to strike—acquire vs. partner vs. license—in a way that best dovetails with the pharmaceutical company’s own R&D and broader business interests.

Bloomberg Law contacted Finnegan attorney Brian Kacedon for his thoughts regarding the trend. He said, “When I first started practicing 20 years ago, it was very much like you were a patent prosecutor [writing patents] or you were a patent litigator. For the stuff in between, there were a lot of deal lawyers and there were people in-house. Outside counsel wasn’t doing that as much.” Acknowledging the trend to include IP lawyers in transactions was slow to take hold, Brian also pointed out, “If the most important part of the deal is really the intellectual property, then involving people who work on that issue day in and day out is really important.”

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