Wednesday, November 5, 2025
Executive Summary
Goodwin Procter partners Natasha Daughtrey and Josh Weinger provided a systematic pre-litigation readiness framework for life sciences startups — covering plaintiff and defendant checklists, the declaratory judgment risks embedded in cease-and-desist letters, willful infringement and enhanced damages under 35 U.S.C. § 284, and the comparative advantages of federal district court, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, and the International Trade Commission — concluding that early engagement of counsel to cure document hygiene, chain of title, and contract defects is almost always less costly than waiting for litigation to expose them.
Instructor(s)
Natasha Daughtrey, Goodwin
Josh Weinger, PhD, Goodwin
Keywords
pre-litigation IP readiness for life sciences companies — plaintiff and defendant checklists • cease-and-desist letters and declaratory judgment jurisdiction — substantial case or controversy test • willful patent infringement and enhanced damages under 35 U.S.C. § 284 • Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) inter partes review — patent validity challenges • International Trade Commission (ITC) Section 337 — exclusion orders as patent remedy • 35 U.S.C. § 271(e) safe harbor — FDA approval activities and patent infringement • AsymmetRx, Inc. v. Biocare Medical, LLC — standing to sue and exclusive license rights • Medicines Co. v. Hospira, Inc. — on-sale bar and contract manufacturer as prior commercial use • how should a life sciences startup respond to a patent cease-and-desist letter? • when does sending a cease-and-desist letter create declaratory judgment exposure? • REGENEXBIO v. Sarepta — 271(e) safe harbor scope and cell culture process patents • document retention policy and attorney-client privilege in patent litigation
Legal Analysis
Plaintiff-Side and Defendant-Side Pre-Litigation Readiness: What Life Sciences Startups Must Know Before the First Filing
Pre-litigation readiness in the life sciences context is not a single act but a layered posture that must be developed on both the offensive and defensive sides of the docket simultaneously. Daughtrey framed the plaintiff-side inquiry around goal-setting as the indispensable first step: before mapping a patent or trade secret portfolio against an accused product, a company must decide whether it is seeking an injunction to exclude a competitor from the market, money damages, a licensing relationship, or some combination of competitive advantages that litigation uniquely provides. She cautioned that startups often enter litigation without this clarity and, as a result, spend resources on remedies they cannot practically obtain or would not actually value. Following that threshold determination, a plaintiff must audit its IP portfolio, review all co-development, API, university, and licensing agreements to confirm that the rights it believes it holds are actually what it conveyed or retained, and collect key documents early enough to evaluate whether case-threatening materials exist before committing to suit. Weinger added that ownership of the patents to be asserted must be demonstrable through valid assignments traceable to the inventors, and that the company must confirm whether its license grants standing to sue independently or only in conjunction with the patent owner — a distinction that can be dispositive.
On the defendant side, Weinger identified a continuous patent landscape analysis as the primary pre-litigation tool: understanding which patents competitors hold, and whether any aspect of the company’s business model touches a protected area, reduces the probability of being caught unprepared by a lawsuit. He acknowledged the cost-benefit tension directly — a fully comprehensive landscape analysis may not be economically justified — but warned that forgoing it entirely leaves a company exposed to the scenario in which “some core part of your business model is directly infringing a very strong patent of one of your competitors.” Building a company’s own IP portfolio serves not only offensive purposes but defensive ones: patents held by the defendant can function as leverage in a cross-license negotiation, enabling both parties to “just get on with their business,” as Weinger put it, without the cost and disruption of full litigation.
Document hygiene and attorney-client privilege preservation are the defensive pillars that Weinger described as “extremely important for litigation preparedness,” and whose neglect he identified as a frequent source of catastrophic case events. Internal written document retention policies, employee training to avoid careless characterizations in emails and messaging applications, and contemporaneous records of R&D milestones all bear directly on the outcome of both patent and trade secret cases. Daughtrey reinforced this theme in her closing remarks, noting that in the discovery phase a company may be required to produce “every email, every Slack message, every team’s message related to development of a product,” and that an offhand internal message saying “oh no, we infringe this patent” can prove dispositive at trial. Attorney-client privilege is only preserved if legal communications remain confidential; sharing them with third parties outside the privilege can waive it and expose litigation strategy. Weinger’s overarching recommendation was to consult counsel early: “there’s a lot of circumstances in which you can deal with a small problem early or a big problem later.”
Cease-and-Desist Letters, Declaratory Judgment Jurisdiction, and the Notice Function for Willful Infringement Damages
A cease-and-desist letter performs two legally distinct functions that are in tension with each other: it notifies the recipient of asserted IP rights — a step that can establish the record necessary to claim willful infringement and enhanced damages — while simultaneously risking the creation of a “substantial case or controversy” that entitles the recipient to file a declaratory judgment action before the patentee chooses its forum. Daughtrey described the declaratory judgment risk as a “very fact specific inquiry” governed by a totality-of-the-circumstances test, under which courts examine the strength of threatening language, the level of infringement analysis provided, whether a response deadline was imposed, the parties’ prior litigation history, the patentee’s enforcement history, whether specific infringing products were identified, and whether the letter caused the recipient to alter its conduct. She offered concrete examples: letters that explicitly threatened litigation unless infringing conduct ceased conferred declaratory judgment jurisdiction; a two-letter exchange in which the first merely identified patents and products and the second rejected a 120-day standstill proposal was sufficient to create a substantial case or controversy even without any explicit infringement accusation; and a disclaimer stating “we have no plans to sue you” did not immunize a letter that otherwise contained strong infringement threats.
By contrast, letters framed as information-gathering requests, bare patent identification without an infringement assertion, and offers to license without further threats or demands did not confer declaratory judgment jurisdiction. The practical implication, as Daughtrey cautioned, is that business personnel who send cease-and-desist letters without counsel’s involvement may inadvertently surrender the patentee’s choice of forum and timing. Equally important, any characterization of the patent’s scope or the accused product’s functionality in a cease-and-desist letter is a potential admission that can be used adversarially in subsequent litigation if the patentee’s litigation strategy evolves. Daughtrey summarized the takeaway plainly: “be careful what you put in your cease and desist letters.”
The notice function of a cease-and-desist letter intersects with the willful infringement doctrine in ways that directly affect the damages available. Weinger explained that pre-suit damages for patent infringement require constructive or actual notice to the public that the patentee’s product is covered by a specific patent — commonly achieved through patent marking under 35 U.S.C. § 287 — or actual notice to the defendant through direct communication. A cease-and-desist letter providing actual notice to a specific defendant can therefore begin the accrual period for pre-suit damages. Moreover, certain forms of indirect infringement — particularly where a pharmaceutical company’s customers, rather than the company itself, practice a patented method of treatment — require that the defendant knew of the patent and knew or should have known that its conduct induced infringement. Willfulness, in turn, unlocks 35 U.S.C. § 284’s provision for enhanced damages of up to three times the base award, a multiplier that Weinger described as “fairly uncommon” but “pretty significant” when applied, and one that is determined by the judge even in cases that otherwise proceed before a jury.
Litigation Venues for Life Sciences IP Disputes: Federal Courts, the PTAB, and the ITC’s Exclusion-Order Remedy
Patent and trade secret litigation in the United States is conducted across three principal venues, each with structural advantages and limitations that must be evaluated against the specific facts and strategic objectives of a particular dispute. Federal district courts remain the primary forum for patent infringement actions and are the exclusive venue for monetary damages. Weinger noted that the duration of a federal patent case ranges from a minimum of approximately eighteen months in the fastest courts to three or four years — “really not uncommon” — and that plaintiff and defendant considerations include the defendant’s location, where infringement occurred, and the docket speed and judicial experience of the district. Cases proceed through pleading, fact discovery (document production, interrogatories, and depositions), expert discovery in which each side’s technical and damages experts disclose their anticipated testimony, and then trial before a judge or jury. Weinger emphasized that the document production obligation cuts both ways: a plaintiff who brings suit must be prepared to provide the defendant with extensive discovery into its own operations.
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board, a tribunal within the USPTO, provides an alternative and often faster mechanism for challenging the validity of an asserted patent. As Weinger explained, a defendant — or a party that anticipates being sued — may petition the PTAB to institute inter partes review and seek cancellation of claims on prior art grounds. One strategic advantage is that a federal court litigation may be stayed pending the PTAB proceeding, effectively pausing the more expensive district court case while validity is resolved administratively. The PTAB pathway is itself not inexpensive, but it can provide a targeted, relatively efficient means of eliminating a patent that is blocking a company’s freedom to operate. The case examples Weinger cited illuminate how pre-litigation diligence might have altered outcomes in both contexts: REGENEXBIO, Inc. v. Sarepta Therapeutics, Inc. (D. Del. 2021) arose because Sarepta apparently failed to identify that its use of certain cultured cells during manufacturing might not qualify for the 35 U.S.C. § 271(e) safe harbor, which protects activities reasonably related to FDA approval but does not extend to tools that are not themselves the product under review.
The International Trade Commission, acting under Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930, 19 U.S.C. § 1337, provides the third major venue for life sciences IP disputes involving imported goods. Unlike federal courts, the ITC cannot award monetary damages; its sole remedy is an exclusion order barring importation of infringing products or products made by infringing processes. Weinger characterized this as “an extremely potent weapon against a competitor if blocking importation is going to disrupt their activities,” and noted that the ITC’s compressed docket — it is “well known for being extremely fast” — makes it particularly attractive when speed of relief is paramount. The cases Weinger discussed also illustrate that the proper venue and strategy depend heavily on contract review: in AsymmetRx, Inc. v. Biocare Medical, LLC, 582 F.3d 1 (1st Cir. 2009), AsymmetRx’s failure to understand that Harvard had retained the right to join infringement suits and had granted parallel non-profit academic licenses resulted in the case being dismissed for want of AsymmetRx’s ability to maintain the suit alone; and in The Medicines Co. v. Hospira, Inc., 827 F.3d 1363 (Fed. Cir. 2016) (en banc), the structure of the Medicines Company’s contract with a contract manufacturer was found to constitute a prior commercial sale that invalidated the asserted patent under the on-sale bar. Both outcomes, Weinger observed, were “based on how their contractual relationship . . . was structured” — a defect that pre-litigation contract review with IP counsel could have identified and corrected.
Generated by AI based on the Interview/Transcript below.
Key Takeaways
- Cease-and-desist letters create declaratory judgment exposure. Daughtrey identified the totality-of-circumstances test as the governing standard and cautioned that explicit infringement accusations, specific product identification, and rejection of a standstill proposal have each been found sufficient to confer declaratory judgment jurisdiction, making counsel review of any such letter non-negotiable.
- Willfulness unlocks enhanced damages up to 3x. Weinger explained that under 35 U.S.C. § 284, a court may treble the jury’s damages award upon a finding of willful infringement — where the defendant knew of the patent and knew or should have known it was infringing — making actual notice through a cease-and-desist letter or patent marking strategically significant for both sides.
- Document hygiene prevents case-shattering disclosures. Both speakers stressed that casual internal communications — emails, Slack and Teams messages — are subject to full production in litigation, and Daughtrey cautioned that a single message saying “oh no, we infringe this patent” can be dispositive at trial, making written document retention policies and employee training an operational necessity.
- Contract review is mandatory before any enforcement action. The AsymmetRx v. Biocare and Medicines Co. v. Hospira cases both illustrate that a patent holder’s failure to understand the terms of its licensing and supply agreements can defeat an otherwise meritorious suit, either by eliminating standing or by invalidating the patent through the on-sale bar.
- The 35 U.S.C. § 271(e) safe harbor has defined limits. Weinger drew on REGENEXBIO, Inc. v. Sarepta Therapeutics, Inc. (D. Del. 2021) to illustrate that the safe harbor protects activities reasonably related to obtaining FDA approval only for the product under review, not for ancillary tools or processes used in its manufacture that are not themselves the subject of the regulatory submission.
- The ITC provides speed and importation leverage, not damages. Weinger described the ITC as “an extremely potent weapon against a competitor” when blocking importation is the objective, while noting that parties seeking monetary compensation must proceed in federal district court, where timelines typically run from eighteen months to several years.
- PTAB inter partes review can stay district court litigation. Defendants facing asserted patents of questionable validity should consider petitioning the PTAB for inter partes review, which can proceed faster than federal court litigation and may result in the district court case being stayed while validity is resolved administratively.
- Defensive IP creates cross-license leverage. Weinger recommended that startups build their own patent portfolios not only to protect market position but to enable cross-license negotiations when sued: having IP of your own allows both parties to “just get on with their business” without the full cost of litigation.
- Engage counsel early to avoid large problems later. Both speakers endorsed early IP counsel engagement as the single most cost-effective pre-litigation measure, with Weinger summarizing: “there’s a lot of circumstances in which you can deal with a small problem early or a big problem later.”
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Interview/Transcript
This transcript was session six of an eight-part BCLT-Oregon Start Up Series. On November 5, 2025, Goodwin experts Natasha Daughtrey and Josh Weinger, PhD discussed How Life Science Companies Should Prepare for Intellectual Property Disputes.
Allison Schmitt 00:28
Hi everyone, and welcome to today’s Startup Series Program, Get Your Ducks in a Row: How Life Sciences Companies Should Prepare for IP Disputes. I know that this is a topic of major interest to many of you. We’ve had conversations about this. And so I’m really excited to bring in two experts today from Goodwin Proctor who are going to be able to walk you through the drill, as it were. So let me introduce our speakers, and then I’m going to turn things over to them to explore this very important topic. And so first up, we’ve got Natasha Daughtrey, who’s a partner in Goodwin Proctor’s Intellectual Property Litigation Practice, and also a member of Goodwin’s Life Sciences Disputes group. She’s been at Goodwin for well over a decade at this point, and has significant experience in all areas of intellectual property, whether she’s representing clients in hotly contested litigations or proactively guiding clients and strategies to avoid litigation altogether where that’s their best strategy. Her legal practice is primarily focused on IP litigation and strategic counseling, and she focuses on patents, trademarks and trade secrets in particular. She’s experienced in guiding companies through all phases of IP litigation, from the initial investigation that you’re going to do and you’re going to learn a little bit about today, all the way to venture jury trial and appeal if that’s where your case ends up heading. She’s also very comfortable at providing invaluable counsel to clients at various stages of their life cycle, assisting with IP strategy and due diligence, which are areas that many of your companies may encounter. Natasha has a diverse portfolio of litigation experience across a wide range of courts, so both in the federal courts, International Trade Commission, and proceedings before the United States Patent and Trademark Office. She’s got a technical expertise and has worked on cases expanding a wide array of technologies, pharmaceuticals and medical devices, all the way to transmissions, lines, software and cosmetics. With Natasha today is Dr. Joshua Weinger, who is a partner in Goodwin’s IP Litigation practice. His practice focuses on patent matters with focus in the areas of biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. Among many other activities, Josh is a regular contributor to Goodwin’s Big Molecule Watch. For those of you who are operating in the biologic space — and Josh and Natasha did not ask me to say this, this is an endorsement I’m passing along based on my own experience. — Goodwin has a fantastic blog focusing on biologics litigation and biologics practice. If your technology is in that area, you should be looking at this blog regularly, and I’m happy to circulate a link for that as well. So Josh is a regular contributor to that blog. I highly recommend that you check it out. So with that, I’m going to go ahead and turn things over to our speakers.
Natasha Daughtrey 03:18
Thank you so much, Allison, and I appreciate the plug for the Big Molecule Watch blog. We’re very proud of all the work that we’ve done on the blog, and if you want to subscribe and get our regular newsletters or posts on the blog, just let us know. We’re happy to add you to the list. So let’s start off. Allison already gave introductions for Josh and I, and at the end, we will have our email addresses so that if you have any questions, comments, or need advice on anything related to the things we discussed today, feel free to reach out. The mandatory disclaimer that all lawyers have to give in these presentations is that this is not legal advice, it’s general. And if you have fact specific inquiries, please reach out to your lawyer. Okay, so just providing a roadmap of where we’re going to go today, we’re going to start with pre litigation readiness, and we’re going to talk about that both from the patentee or plaintiff side and also from the defendant or accused infringer side — the things that you need to be thinking about to prepare for potential litigation. Now, before you even get to litigation, for most of you, the life stage of the company that you’re at right now, you’re probably not going to be in litigation but you might be sending or responding to cease and desist letters. So we’ll talk about the ins and outs of those. You probably receive a lot of them, and you might not know what to do. And so we’ll help you figure that out. And then we’re also going to talk about the fundamentals of litigation in the US. There’s going to be other presentations that go into more detail on this, but we wanted to kind of set that up and preview the different ways that you can litigate in the US.
Natasha Daughtrey 05:00
So starting with pre litigation readiness. Before we get into this, I wanted to just provide a very high level overview of what is intellectual property. Intellectual property — it’s a general term for categories of rights and intangible creations of the mind. There’s four main types of IP, only two of which we’re going to be talking about today. Patents are the property that protects your rights and useful inventions and discoveries. This is going to be your chemical compounds, your antibodies, your methods of treatment using those compounds, your manufacturing processes for using those compounds, your delivery devices, all of those types of things. And then there’s trade secrets. Trade secrets protect commercially valuable confidential information like business and financial plans, formulas, recipes, customer information. There’s a lot of things that people choose to maintain as trade secrets or as patents. There are some benefits to going those different routes. We’re not going to go into that in too much detail here, but it’s important for you to just understand the differences between those. And then there’s copyrights and trademarks, which we’re not really going to touch on today, but it’s important for you to also understand that those are other types of IP that are important to protect. And you know, frankly, a lot of the tips and tricks and ideas that we provide to you today will also be helpful for you in responding to litigation readiness and cease and desist letters in those areas as well, but we’re just not going to be focused on that today. So let’s talk a little bit more about the distinction between trade secret versus patent. This is a chart that has a lot of information. I’m not going to go through all of it, but I’m going to just highlight a few things. First of all, patent protection is based on federal law, pretty much exclusively, whereas trade secret protection is more based on — there’s federal law and there’s state law and common law that can apply to that. The big difference substantively between patent and trade secret is that for a patent, you have to disclose it. You have to file it with the US Patent and Trademark Office to get the patent. Part of the bargain that you’re making with the government and with the public is that you disclose your invention, and you get rights in exchange for disclosing your invention. Whereas on the trade secret, it’s kind of the opposite of that. You only maintain a trade secret and the rights of the trade secret if you keep it confidential, so you do not disclose it publicly. If you do disclose it publicly, it’s no longer a trade secret. The other key difference between these two patents usually are limited to 20 years from filing. That’s how long you have the exclusive rights for that. Whereas trade secrets can be indefinite, and there’s some trade secrets that because they’ve been maintained as a secret so long, they have been in force for decades and decades and decades. Some of the most notable trade secrets are how to make Coca Cola, like the formula for Coca Cola, and KFC’s spice recipe for their chicken. And so those are the key differences between trade secrets and patent. Okay. So let’s go through the first checklist of considerations for pre litigation readiness. And this is going to be focused on the patentee side, or the plaintiff side, which usually is the patentee, but not always. So the first thing, if you’re ever considering bringing a suit, you need to think about, what’s your end goal? If you have a win, what does that actually look like? And that’s going to vary depending on the circumstances. And you need to think about this before you put a plan in place for actually pursuing litigation. Start with your end goal. So do you want an injunction, which means keeping the other side off the market altogether? Do you want damages like money? I mean, everyone wants money, but for this particular case, is that what your end goal is? What’s more valuable to you, keeping them off the market or getting damages from them? Maybe you just want them to take a license. You’re not actually going to go all the way to trial and try and get a damages award. You just want to get a license from the other side, which would have some kind of, you know, monetary exchange. There could be other competitive advantages from litigation. You obviously have to have a valid basis to ever bring a lawsuit, but lawsuits are very disruptive for organizations. They are time intensive and resource intensive, and so even just being involved in litigation, it’s going to impact your company, but it’s also going to impact the company that you’re bringing suit against. So after you’ve identified what your goal is, then you need to identify the IP: patents versus trade secrets. And obviously there’s going to be a whole process for doing that analysis, looking at your entire portfolio, looking at the potential products you could accuse. On the trade secret side, oftentimes, what’s going to have happened is you’re going to have some employee mobility, going from your company to another company, and then being able to observe what that new company is doing, and maybe they took some of your trade secrets. So that’s a little bit of a different investigation you would do there. Then it’s really important to check all of your contracts. And Josh is going to talk about these in a little bit more detail and why this matters. But you need to review your co development agreements, API agreements, university agreements, licenses, confidentiality agreements, and that’s because the rights that you think you might have, or think you might have conveyed to others, might not necessarily be what you actually did. So before you file suit, make sure you’ve done a review of all of those things. Document collection. You need to have your documents, key documents at least, ready to produce early in the litigation, and not just even for production in the litigation, but so that you know what they say. You don’t want to find out halfway through a case that you have some case shattering, awful document in your possession. You want to know that in the beginning, so that you can make the right decisions about what whether even to bring the case. Also important to consider counter suits. If you’re thinking of suing someone, it’s possible that they have IP that they could counter sue you on, or other claims they could bring about against you. So just make sure that you understand the potential risks of bringing suit, and that would include any countersuits or counter claims. I’m going to hand it off to Josh to do the rest of the checklist of considerations.
Josh Weinger 12:11
Thanks, Natasha. If you’re thinking about bringing a lawsuit, another really important consideration in getting ready is to make sure that you have access to the intellectual property rights that you’re considering ‘asserting’ and the people that you’re going to need in order to tell your story in the context of a lawsuit. So the patents, if it’s a patent case, the patents themselves, you need to make sure that you actually own those patents, and that you can prove it to the extent that’s going to be necessary to convince the courts that you actually have the right to sue someone else for infringing the patent. And that involves making sure that the — as Natasha mentioned — the contracts, you need to make sure that the the assignments, where you took possession of the patents are valid and all the documentation is available. You need to make sure that you have the proper licenses if you are the licensee, and that all of the rights that you need in order to assert the patents are included in the license that you have. And if there are some situations where you can have a license and not have the right to sue someone on your own, but you can sue them if the owner of the patent is involved, and you need to make sure, if that’s the situation, that you have their participation as well. In terms of witnesses, in any lawsuit, it’s critically important that you have the people who can tell the court what happened available to you to tell that story. In patent cases that’s very often the inventor, but involves other people as well, people who worked on whatever the product is, people who worked on marketing and a number of other roles, and you need to make sure that you have their participation, and particularly if they’re no longer at your company. So very often, there will be patents that a company owns, but the inventor has moved on, and you may need that inventor in order to pursue the lawsuit. And so you need to make sure that your relationship with that person is good and that they’re available if they’re needed. And the same is true for all the other types of roles I mentioned. In the trade secret context, if there are people who were involved in generating the trade secret or maintaining its confidentiality, you may need their participation as well. And so before you can really get going on a lawsuit, you need to make sure that those people are available as you’ll need them. For patent cases, you probably should take a close look to make sure that the patent is strong enough to assert it. In patent cases, typically the major areas of dispute are whether the defendant is infringing the patents, and then whether the patent is valid, meaning, whether it should have been issued in the first place. And sometimes it can be quite complicated to do a careful assessment of that. Usually that should be in consultation with your lawyers, but it can take some time and some resources to do a full investigation so that you know how strong your suit is. In the course of litigation, you’re going to need experts, someone who can explain to a judge or a jury what the technology is about and why the defendant infringes, why your patent was innovative at the time, and why you adequately disclosed it, and sometimes these really technical issues can be difficult for federal judges who are typically quite smart but may not have any background at all in the area of technology that you work in, and juries who are just people from the community may not have any background either. And it’s typically the experts that explain to the court or jury what the case is about and and the technology, and having good experts who can clearly convey that information is really important. And as a plaintiff, you often want to get that lined up before you get started on a lawsuit. Now, Natasha mentioned having a clear idea of what the objective of the lawsuit is, and by damages, we’re referring to monetary penalties on the defendant for infringing a patent or misappropriating a trade secret. And if your goal is to get damages, you should have a clear understanding of what damages are actually going to be available and do an assessment of what they would be. Sometimes, lawsuits can be very expensive, and you may have a view of how much money you would be entitled to if you win, but the facts of the market that you work in, the facts of the defendants product, and the extent of their infringement may not actually bear out to the type of damages that you’re looking for, and that may mean the lawsuits not worth it at all. So it’s important to do an assessment early to ensure that what you’re expecting is actually realistic. And then finally, parties and jurisdiction. So the parties are, who’s involved in the lawsuit, who are the defendants? Who do you need to be involved, and who are additional parties that could be involved, and whether it makes sense to include them or not. So, for example, for patent infringement, you want to make sure that you know who is the party that is actually infringing your patent. If it’s a trade secret case, who misappropriated, who was involved, and who do you need to target with your lawsuit? And for jurisdiction, which court should you pursue your lawsuit in? Is it a federal case? Is it a state case? There are agency tribunals within the federal government that may be places where you can bring your lawsuit, and these different jurisdictions and venues have different pros and cons. So it’s important to carefully consider where you’re going to sue.
Josh Weinger 18:56
So flipping over to the other side as a defendant, if you think that there’s a chance that you may get sued, or, you know, often it’s a good idea to try to avoid a situation where that would even arise in the first place, and there’s a number of ways that you can prepare for litigation as a defendant or work to avoid litigation at all. If you’re working in an area of technology where you know there’s a lot of patents, it can be really important to make sure that you know what the patent landscape is like. What patents do your competitors have? Which parts of your business model may be nearing an area that is covered by somebody else’s patent. Now this can be a very complicated task, especially if you’re working in an area where there’s a lot of competition, and your competitors have lots of different patents on different aspects of the field. And it’s always a cost benefit analysis to know how much of this sort of diligence you want to do, because looking through other companies patents is a time consuming endeavor, and you’ll probably need attorneys or patent agents to help you with that, and it can be expensive to be really comprehensive. So reducing the risk to zero may not justify the cost of a fully comprehensive patent landscape analysis. So that is an important consideration when you’re thinking about how far do I want to go in making sure I understand the patent landscape. On the other side, not doing any of it may create a huge risk for your company, because you don’t have any idea if some core part of your business model is directly infringing a very strong patent of one of your competitors. So it’s important to look into this and then make a thoughtful decision about how much you want to spend in terms of resources on getting a handle on on the landscape. It’s important to have your own IP both for offensive and defensive purposes. Patents, for example, can be really useful to keep your competitors off the market, but they’re also really useful as collateral leverage in case you get sued by one of your competitors, and then you can say, well, I have this other patent that’s covering something you’re doing. Let’s just call it even, or what’s what’s work something out so that everybody can just get on with their business, and that may be the best outcome for you. And so your own IP can be used defensively in that way, in really important ways.
Josh Weinger 22:00
Internal written policies regarding documentation is extremely important for litigation preparedness. Intellectual property litigation often comes down to what do the documents say? If it’s a trade secret case, can you document that you obtain the information through legitimate means. Or on the other hand, are there documents that are going to be really problematic if they come out in a litigation? So it’s important to have really good document retention policies that are clear and written and established, and it’s important to have good document hygiene. Training your personnel not to put things in documents that are going to get them in trouble later. In litigation, it’s incredibly common for a case to really turn on some email that someone sent and thought nothing of at the time, and it’s the only record of some critical fact that either was extremely important for the company that wrote the email to be able to prove or, on the other hand, it makes the other side’s case because someone was just being careless about what they said in an email or a memo or something like that. And particularly for patent cases, having records of inventions is extremely important on both the plaintiff side and the defendant side, because if you can prove that you had the idea first, that can be really important in defending against someone else’s patent. So it’s really important to make sure that you have policies governing how you handle documents and what your employees are putting in documents. It’s also really important to make sure that you’re maintaining attorney client privilege over your communications with your attorney. This is another issue that comes up all the time in litigation, and your communications with your attorney are only going to be privileged if you are keeping them confidential between you and your attorney. If you are opening those conversations to third parties who are not part of your company and within that that privilege, it may waive the privilege, and then the things that you say to your attorney may be exposed during litigation. And then finally, I think kind of came through, all the things on the list, a lot of preparedness involves and requires an understanding of what is going to happen in litigation, and it can be really helpful to talk to someone who understands how these cases go and and what you need to do to prepare. So having conversations with your counsel as appropriate can go a really long way to being ready and short conversations early on in the development of your company, can be extremely helpful in avoiding really big, really expensive problems down the road. So it can make a lot of sense to loop in advice of counsel early on, just to make sure that you’re doing the right things and your bases are covered.
Josh Weinger 25:53
On the trade secret side, trade secret misappropriation requires that you’ve acquired a trade secret from someone else by improper means. And a big part of being prepared as a trade secret defendant, or hopefully to avoid being a trade secret defendant, is to make sure that you’re not doing that. So if you can avoid receiving third party confidential information carelessly, or hopefully not deliberately, that is really important, and make sure that when you are receiving third party confidential information, you have the consent of that third party and you have documentation of that consent where that’s appropriate. And make sure you understand the source of confidential information that you’re bringing in. And make sure that your employees understand the obligation to only receive third party confidential information by legitimate means. Companies get in trouble all the time because employees went out, took information from someone else, brought it into the company, and even though it wasn’t at the direction of their managers, if your company ends up benefiting from the misappropriation of trade secrets by one of your employees, it can be a very expensive and damaging problem. Having policies in place to prevent that from happening is an important preventative measure. And then again, care in hiring is critical in so many ways, but certainly in the context of preparing for and avoiding trade secret litigation it’s critical because if you can’t trust your people to behave appropriately, you can run into problems and it really emphasizes the need to make sure that you’re you’re hiring people you can trust. Keeping R&D separate from competitive intelligence is another important way to avoid trade secret problems. These are going to be different kinds of intellectual property generated by these different teams, and if your R&D teams are walled off from your competitive intelligence teams that will help to avoid painting your R&D process with information that came from competitors, particularly in ways that will help avoid the incorporation of someone else’s trade secret into your R&D program. And then finally — once again, I’m going to talk about documentation — a really good way to defend against trade secret misappropriation is to be able to show documents that show that you and your people came up with the ideas on their own and did not rely on a competitor’s ideas or information that came from the outside illicitly, and having that documentation available can make or break a trade secret case. So it’s important to maintain those types of documents as you go.
Josh Weinger 29:44
Okay, so I’m going to tell you about just a few examples of cases that illustrate some of these principles that we’ve been talking about. So the first one is the REGENEXBIO versus Sarepta case from a couple of years ago. Sarepta is a gene therapy company that was developing a therapeutic and they were nearing FDA approval, and they were sued by REGENEXBIO, who had patents covering cultured cells that were used early in the development and the manufacturing process of Sarepta’s product. But weren’t the patents didn’t cover the product itself, but rather some tools that were, the cultured cells, that were used in the process of making the product. Sarepta believed that they were covered by what’s called the 271 safe harbor, which protects companies from claims of patent infringement over technologies that need FDA approval in order to sell them before the product is actually on the market. So if you’re developing a drug, whether it’s an innovative drug that being developed for the first time, or it’s a generic version of a drug that’s already on the market, if what you are doing is developing information that you need to submit to FDA to get approval, those activities are protected by the safe harbor. Now, Sarepta thought that the use of these cultured cells would be protected by the safe harbor, but they ended up being sued by REGENEXBIO, and the court found that because the cells are not themselves the product, the safe harbor didn’t apply and the lawsuit could proceed. And this was a situation where Sarepta was apparently caught off guard by this lawsuit and their potential liability, and by looking at the patent landscape a little more carefully, a little more thoroughly, they may have identified this issue earlier than they did, and may have been able to work around it. But as it was, it resulted in a pretty significant lawsuit. Another example is the Lonza v. Adva case. This was a case about cell therapy companies and Adva made bio reactors for use in hospitals, which is a important piece of machinery for several different kinds of cell therapies. During the lawsuit, it looked like Adva was going to be enjoined from selling these instruments, based on the lawsuit, which was going to have a pretty significant impact on some cell therapy companies that were relying on the availability of this piece of equipment. And the point here is you may need to look at, not just your own activities, and determine whether there’s any risk of a patent infringement suit, but also if you have critical suppliers or partners that you’re working with, potential patent liability for them may have a really serious impact on your business. So when you’re doing your diligence, it can be really important to look at those pressure points as well. To illustrate the point that Natasha made earlier about the importance of being familiar with your contracts: In the AsymmetRx versus Biocare case, AsymmetRx had an exclusive license from Harvard University for commercial uses of certain diagnostic tests. But, in the contract, Harvard retained key rights, including the right to use — there was a patent on an antibody for use in diagnostic tests — and Harvard retained key rights, including the right to use the antibodies for academic research. They retain the right to grant licenses to other non profits for academic research, and they had the right to join any infringement suit or bring their own suit. And these are key rights when courts decide who has the right to sue for infringement of a particular patent, and ultimately the court where, in which AsymmetRx sued Biocare for infringement of this patent, decided that the lawsuit couldn’t proceed without Harvard’s participation. And that was problematic for AsymmetRx. And depending on the particular circumstances, you may need the participation of a license or another party that is unwilling to participate, or who has a relationship with your potential defendant. So the point is that because AsymmetRx didn’t have a full understanding of its contract, its licensing contract, its lawsuit was unsuccessful. And then in another example of how the details of your contracts can impact the lawsuit in the Medicines. Co versus Hospira case, the Medicines Company had developed a improved manufacturing process for a particular drug compound. Over the years of the development, they had worked with a couple of different contract research organizations and contract manufacturers to work on this compound, and it turned out that because of the way their contract with one of these suppliers was structured, under the rules of US patent law, the use of this manufacturing process that they were seeking to patent had been sold prior to the time when they filed for the patent, and that was the basis for the patent being invalid. And it really was based on how their contractual relationship with their supplier was structured that led to them not having the patent rights that they thought they had. So again, it’s important to understand the terms of your contracts and to talk about those terms with your IP Council, to make sure that they’re not causing problems. And then the last example I’m going to talk about illustrates the importance of knowing who your partners are. In Fate Therapeutics versus Shoreline Biosciences, this was a a patent infringement case, or it started out as a patent infringement case, and it devolved into a trade secret case, where the plaintiff accused one of its scientific advisors of taking technology from the company and then starting their own company based on information and secrets they had obtained from the plaintiff, unbeknownst to the other founders of the new company. So I think both the plaintiff and the defendant in this case were caught off guard by the behavior of one individual. And it really goes to emphasize the importance of knowing who your partners are and making sure that you can trust them and that they’re adequately vetted.
Natasha Daughtrey 39:11
Great. Thanks, Josh. So next we’re going to turn to a situation that you probably are going to deal with more frequently, hopefully than actual litigation, which is sending and responding to cease and desist letters. So let’s start with, you know, you’re thinking of sending a cease and desist letter. In a lot of ways it’s similar to where we started with when you’re preparing to file a lawsuit. Start with your goals. What are you trying to do here? Do you just want the recipient to take a license to the patent? Are you trying to set up a paper trail or invoke a period notice for damages down the road in a litigation? And we’ll talk about what required of that. Are you trying to get them to change course and do a design around? Or maybe just make them think twice. Maybe you’re not sure what your end goal is, but you just need to think about that before you get to your letter writing campaign. Consider the timing. We’ll talk about this in more detail, but the notice letter can set the timeframe for damages to begin accruing, and even for causes of certain types of infringement to begin. So we’ll talk a little bit about that. You need to think about the level of detail, and this matters a lot, because the sending of a note of a cease and desist letter can actually cause you to be sued. So how much detail you put in there really does matter in terms of exposing yourself to risk. So talking about that risk, so if there is this — it’s called a substantial case or controversy between two parties, that’s a legal term –someone that’s being accused of patent infringement or trade secret misappropriation, they can file a declaratory judgment action asserting that the patents not infringed, invalid, unenforceable. Or they could say we didn’t steal their trade secret, or what we have is not a trade secret. So you may be sending a letter to someone to say, ‘Hey, these are my rights. Stay off my rights, or I’m going to sue you,’ and in response, you might get sued where they say, ‘Hey, there’s a case or controversy between us. Let’s duke it out in the courts.’ So courts do this. It’s called the all the circumstances test to determine whether there is a substantial case or controversy, and they’re going to look to the strength of any threatening language in your letters or emails, whatever they are. What level of detail of infringement analysis did you put in the letter? Did the patentee have a deadline to respond? Was there prior litigation between the parties? Has the patentee had a history of enforcement? Did the letter identify specific infringing products, and did the patentee threats cause the recipient to change their behavior? So it’s a very fact specific inquiry, and this is why it’s important to get your in house counsel or outside counsel involved in these discussions. You don’t want to have, for example, a business person at your company sending out a bunch of cease and desist letters to everyone, and not realizing the potential implications of that. So the takeaway is, be careful what you put in your cease and desist letters. There are benefits to sending those, but there are also potential risks to it. And one other thing to note that’s not on the slide, but anything you put in writing and share with a third party could be used against you later. So be careful about how you’re characterizing your IP or what the patent covers, or what the accused infringing product does, because later in a litigation, if you need to change your strategy in that regard, that admission can be used against you.
Natasha Daughtrey 43:16
So just to give you some more concrete examples, notice letters that did confer declaratory judgment jurisdiction –which means someone that was accused of infringement then sued the patentee, saying, ‘courts, we want you to decide whether we infringe this patent and whether this patent is valid.’ And the court said, ‘Yep, we’re going to hear this lawsuit.’ — letters that explicitly threatened litigation unless the recipient stopped doing the infringing conduct that was found sufficient. If the letter said that you’re likely selling other infringing products in the US and warned that we’re the patent holder, we enforce our IP, that was sufficient. In one case, there were two letters that were sent back and forth between the parties. The first letter just identified patents and products. Like here’s these patents, we see you have these products, but it didn’t even make the connection between infringement or identify specific claims that were infringed or had claim charts or anything like that. The second letter rejected the recipients offer of 120 day stand still where neither party would sue. So just between those two letters, the court said there’s a substantial case or controversy here, even though neither of the letters had a specific statement of infringement. And in one case, the letter, the cease and desist letter, said we have no plans to sue you, but it had other indications that there was a substantial case or controversy. So you can’t make really strong threat, threats of infringement, and say you better change your product, but we’re not going to sue you and think, ‘oh, that that gets me out of potentially being sued myself.’ So notice letters that did not confer declaratory judgment jurisdiction — if you just say, ‘here’s a patent. We see that you’re you have this product line’ without more that did not confer jurisdiction. Letters that are framed as information gathering requests rather than an assertion of rights have also been found not to confer declaratory judgment jurisdiction. And then offering a license without any additional threats or demands did not confer declaratory judgment jurisdiction. So those are just some examples. Again, it’s very fact specific, this inquiry, so I would say talk to a lawyer before you send one of these.
Josh Weinger 45:53
All right. Thanks, Natasha. A lot of people think about cease and desist letters as primarily being about trying to get the recipient to stop doing something that you don’t want them to do. But they also have an important notice function of putting other parties on notice of your intellectual property rights that can be important for establishing certain types of claims in an eventual litigation or in a settlement negotiation or a licensing negotiation. One of them is the entitlement to pre suit damages for your patent. So if you are selling a product and it’s covered by one of your patents, you can be entitled to damages for infringement, beginning before the lawsuit occurs, if the public is on notice that you have this patent and the product is covered by it. And that requires notice to the public, which can be by marking the product, and that’s why, on a lot of products, you see patent pending or an identification of a patent number on products or on companies websites, or in other ways. But the notice can also come from actual notice to a particular defendant, which can be in the form of a communication from you to them. So you send them a letter and tell them, hey, look, I have this patent. Now you have put them on notice that this patent exists and that may entitle you to more damages if it comes down to a lawsuit. Also, certain kinds of infringement require knowledge of the patent and that the defendant is infringing. So that comes up in the context of indirect infringement, where a defendant is responsible for the infringement of another. An example of indirect infringement that comes up a lot is where a pharmaceutical company may be responsible for the infringement of physicians and healthcare providers. You know, for example, on a method of treatment patent that covers a way to use a drug for to treat certain disorders. The pharmaceutical companies themselves are not treating patients and may not be practicing those methods, but the physicians that are purchasing the drug or the patients that are purchasing the drug are the actual infringers. But pharmaceutical companies don’t typically sue doctors and patients. They go after the other pharmaceutical companies. And an indirect infringement can be the vehicle for pursuing those suits, and certain kinds of indirect infringement require that the defendant knew about the patent. So in those circumstances, it can be important to make sure that the other parties who may be using your patent haven’t had knowledge of them. And then finally, if a defendant is found to infringe a patent, and I’ll get to this more on the next slide, the damages they owe can be increased if the infringement was willful, where they knew about the patent and either knew or should have known that that they were infringing, and then they infringed anyways. And of course, in that circumstance, knowledge of the patent is important as well, and that can be another reason to put other people on notice of your patent rights. To get into the willful infringement a little bit more, there’s a statutory basis based in statute that if someone you sue has been infringing your patent willfully, you can be entitled to up to three times the damages amount that’s found, and that’s an amount that will be determined by the judge, even in a case where there’s a jury trial. But obviously a three fold increase can be pretty significant. And now, three fold increase in damages is fairly uncommon and is usually reserved for really egregious conduct, but you can get an increase in the damages in any case where willfulness is found, and it can be pretty, pretty significant.
Natasha Daughtrey 51:08
Thanks, Josh. Okay, so now we’ve been covering what to do from the person sending a cease and desist letter, and now I want to talk about what happens when you receive a cease and desist letter. So first of all, don’t ignore it. Don’t pretend that it didn’t arrive. You’ve got to deal with it when you get one of these, and you need to evaluate it substantively. What are the assertions in the letter? What intellectual property have they identified? Patents, trade secrets, whatever it is, and if they do identify specific patents or specific trade secrets that have been allegedly misappropriated, you’ve got to look into the underlying facts. If it’s a patent that they’re asserting you’re infringing, you need to see. Do you infringe? Is there a non infringement argument you have available? Maybe you think the patents invalid, maybe it’s unenforceable for some reason. This is often when the question comes up in companies of, well, do we need to obtain an opinion of counsel? And an opinion of counsel is typically a formal, written opinion outlining why the accused product doesn’t infringe the patent — why the patents invalid or unenforceable. And I can’t tell you right now whether you need to obtain an opinion of counsel in response to every cease and desist letter. It’s really going to be fact specific. Oftentimes there’s business considerations, you know, the closeness of the case, importance of the product line, the size of the potential damages award, the likelihood of litigation, all of those things are going to come into play when you’re determining whether you need an opinion of counsel. And it’s similar to what Josh mentioned earlier, that there’s a consideration of the cost of getting an opinion of counsel over how important it is for you to have that. Obviously, Josh was just talking about willfulness. Well, one of the things to prove that you didn’t willfully infringe a patent is ‘we had an opinion of counsel showing that we didn’t infringe it.’ So there’s benefits to that, but obviously cost to that as well. When you receive a cease and desist letter, it’s important to know who your adversary is and who sent it. Is it a major law firm with a record of bringing successful suits, or is it a solo practitioner who has never litigated before? And you think, Okay, well, based on just who sent it, they probably just want to maybe talk with us, and maybe we’ll pay some kind of a royalty rate, or maybe we won’t pay anything, and they have no intentions of really asserting this patent. So its important to see who it came from. The potential options for a response is a pretty broad range. You can be really aggressive, and if there’s sufficient accusations and language in the letter, you can go so far as to immediately file your own declaratory judgment action to challenge that patent. Whether you know you infringe the patent or it’s invalid. There are also administrative challenges to patent validity that we’re going to talk about in a minute that are less involved and expensive than full fledged litigation, but also still quite costly. Sometimes people choose to just have a somewhat more detailed response with reasons why the IP isn’t applicable. You can say, thanks for your letter, but we don’t practice elements a, b and c, so we don’t infringe your letter the patent, and have a nice day. And sometimes the letter just literally says, let’s talk, and it’s kind of kicking the can down the road a little bit. But maybe you just want to get on the phone. Sometimes business to business discussions are helpful to figure out if maybe there’s the potential to cross license. Like Josh mentioned earlier, if you have your own IP, they have their IP, you can say, let’s do a cross license and be done with this. And sometimes people have responsive letters that say, Thanks for your letter. We disagree, and it’s essentially a go pound sand response. And sometimes people choose not to respond at all and see if there’s any follow up. All the different responses you can have are really going to depend on the circumstance of the case, like how much money you have available. Some of you that are watching this have very limited funding available to handle these issues. And so it might be that no response at all is what you need to do now, until you get further along in your fundraising, or your life cycle, and that’s okay, as long as you understand the potential risks related to that. Okay, now, Josh, why don’t you take it from here?
Josh Weinger 56:09
Sure. I’m just going to give a very brief, high level overview of some of the basics of patent litigation in the US. Obviously, this is a very complex topic with lots of detail and nuance, but we’re just going to hit some high points today to give you a sense. So in the United States, federal courts handle most intellectual property litigation and essentially all patent litigation. There are trade secret cases that are litigated in state court, but patent law is governed by federal law, and the primary venue is in federal court. And there are federal courts all throughout the country, and there are rules governing where you can bring a suit, depending on where the defendant is located and where the infringement occurred. So there are a number of considerations that you would need to discuss with your litigation attorneys to decide where is the most appropriate place if you want to bring a standard patent infringement suit in federal court, but that’s the primary venue. There’s also the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, which is a part of the US Patent and Trademark Office. It is a tribunal that can decide about the validity of a patent so you can bring as a defendant, or if you think that you may be sued for patent infringement, or you have been recently sued for patent infringement, you can challenge the patent in front of the PTAB and try to have the patent found invalid, which can short circuit the litigation. One advantage of that course of action is it can be a little bit quicker than litigation in federal courts, and sometimes a case in federal court will be put on hold while the PTAB hears a challenge to the patent. And then finally, there is the International Trade Commission, which handles disputes about unfair practices relating to importation of goods, and including in the context of patents, where if you believe that someone is importing an infringing good from abroad or is using a patented manufacturing method and importing resulting products, or is misappropiating trade secrets and part of their misappropriation is importation, you can bring a case in the ITC. The only remedy that is available from the ITC is that they can block importation of whatever the infringing good is. So if you’re looking for monetary damages, this is not the right venue for you, but it can be an extremely potent weapon against a competitor if blocking importation is going to disrupt their activities. So that’s another venue to consider. Again, each of these venues have unique advantages and disadvantages and unique rules and are different in terms of what the remedy available is. So it’s important to think carefully and get advice from counsel when deciding what to do. And then on this slide, a very high level summary of what is going to happen if you bring a lawsuit or if you get sued. Litigation in federal court has a number of stages. The first is the pleading stage, where the plaintiff files a complaint that says, here’s why I’m entitled to some relief from the court. It lays out some of the basic facts and the accusations against the defendant. And then the defendant has to respond and say, either some of these things you’re saying are true, some of them are not true. Here’s why, I don’t think that you’re entitled to any relief. Then once the case starts, the court will typically enter a schedule and back discovery begins and and that’s where the parties exchange information relevant to the lawsuit. And this can be a very onerous process. In some cases, it’s simple and straightforward, but very often, particularly in patent cases, it’s quite involved. Each party can ask the other side for documents, and are entitled to get them as long as they’re sufficiently related to the case. And that’s something to really consider when you’re thinking about bringing a lawsuit. It subjects you to discovery requests from the other side, and an obligation to provide the defendant with a lot of information which can be quite onerous and sometimes uncomfortable. It also fact discovery also involves depositions of relevant witnesses, which again, can be uncomfortable, but it’s an important part of the information exchange. In patent cases, particularly, expert discovery is critically important, and this is a stage of the case where both sides disclose to the other side what their experts are planning to say in the event of an eventual trial. And so it involves working with experts, developing their theories, or, in a patent case, why the defendant infringes, why the defendant doesn’t infringe, why the patent is valid, responses to the other side’s arguments. All the things that experts may need to say at trial to prove your side of the case will need to be developed during expert discovery. And then finally, a trial. Some patent cases are heard before a jury, some are heard by by a judge, and the rules for that depend on the circumstances, but the trial is the culmination of a patent case, and typically, a patent case in federal court in the United States can be as fast as 18 months, very occasionally faster than that, but that’s quite fast. But they can also take a number of years. Three or four years is really not uncommon for a patent case. Some of the other venues I mentioned on an earlier slide, are faster than that. The ITC is well known for being extremely fast, which depending on the circumstances may be a real benefit. So that’s another consideration when thinking about litigation.
Natasha Daughtrey 1:03:41
And just to bring it back to one of the things that we said early in the case about your litigation checklist and things to consider in that fact discovery phase Josh was talking about, you may have to produce, in some cases, every email, every Slack message, every team’s message related to development of a product. And so it’s really important to have that good document hygiene, good practices, training your people to not say things in those more casual messaging apps, things like, ‘oh, no, we infringe this patent. Or, man, our patents are terrible.’ You don’t want to have people saying that, because it will get disclosed later, and someone will be kicking themselves. So just wrapping things up. Key takeaways — it’s important to be prepared for this possibility. In the life science space, there is a lot of pre litigation and litigation. Unfortunately for a lot of life science companies, their IP is their most valuable asset, or at least one of their most valuable assets, and because it’s so valuable, that means people are willing to enforce it and threats of litigation. Depending on what part of your company it’s targeting or where it is in your life cycle, it can be incredibly disruptive and sometimes even fatal. So having an understanding of the different enforcement mechanisms and how to defend yourself against enforcement is really important. And one of the things that I do most in my practice is counseling clients on how to avoid litigation. I mean, I’m an IP litigator, but a lot of what we do is helping people avoid litigation, which is sometimes better than winning at trial, is to not have the litigation and get the outcome you want. Josh, do you have anything to add on conclusions?
Josh Weinger 1:06:02
I’ll just reiterate the importance of getting advice about your specific case if you think you have an issue, and doing that early, rather than waiting for a problem to snowball, can go a long way to reducing the impact of these types of disputes. I think Natasha was alluding to that. But there’s a lot of circumstances in which you can deal with a small problem early or a big problem later.
Natasha Daughtrey 1:06:39
That’s great advice, Josh. So thank you for joining us. Our emails are on the slide, and daughtry@goodwinlaw.com and jweinger@goodwinlaw.com. Reach out by email. You can connect with us on LinkedIn, and it was a pleasure to talk with you today.
Allison Schmitt 1:06:55
I want to thank you both so much for a really insightful and helpful program as our startup companies are venturing into the wild legal world that we spend a lot of time thinking about. I think you both did a terrific job of distilling really important key takeaways for our audience. I really want to thank you for the outstanding presentation to our audience. Thank you so much for joining us, and we really look forward to seeing you at our next program.