The Bradley Arant Boult Cummings Life Sciences Industry Team provides a wide range of legal services to clients in the pharmaceutical, medical device, biotechnology, healthcare, and biofuel industries. We offer a cross-disciplinary team of seasoned legal professionals from a number of practices focused on meeting the specific needs of companies, inventors, investors and institutions involved in life sciences. Our attorneys draw on extensive scientific, legal and industry experience to develop innovative, comprehensive solutions that work seamlessly with our clients’ strategic business goals.
The Bradley Arant Boult Cummings Life Sciences Industry Team provides a wide range of legal services to clients in the pharmaceutical, medical device, biotechnology, healthcare, and biofuel industries. We offer a cross-disciplinary team of seasoned legal professionals from a number of practices focused on meeting the specific needs of companies, inventors, investors and institutions involved in life sciences. Our attorneys draw on extensive scientific, legal and industry experience to develop innovative, comprehensive solutions that work seamlessly with our clients’ strategic business goals.
Our firm has taken the lead in establishing leading life sciences industry associations, including the Partnership for Biotechnology Research and the Biotechnology Association of Alabama, both of which are dedicated to enhancing biotechnology and the life sciences industry. Our attorneys are also active in the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), and have served in leadership positions in many of these nonprofit groups. The firm is very active in shaping and directing the growth of biotechnology and life sciences.
We represent clients of all sizes, from start-ups and emerging businesses to established regional companies and national or international corporations. Through our cross-disciplinary approach, we offer life sciences clients a central point of contact for legal services that address every phase of their growth and development.
Business Organization, Growth and Operations
The firm counsels life sciences companies on all aspects of the formation and growth of their business operations. For start-ups, we advise on business strategy and plans, assembling the founding management team, and selecting and forming the appropriate business entity. As companies look to expand, we provide seasoned M&A counsel, ensuring deals are not only technically sound from a legal perspective, but the right option for our clients.
We also assist companies with structuring stock option and other employee incentive plans and preparing employment, consulting, confidentiality, R&D, HIPPA, and proprietary information agreements. Members of our team regularly provide counsel regarding federal, state and local regulatory compliance, governmental affairs, and taxation at the local, state, federal and international levels. We also assist life sciences companies with locating, permitting, developing and financing new or expanding facilities.
Raising Capital and Financing
Accessing capital is key to the success of many life sciences companies. It provides the liquidity necessary to fuel continued growth. We have broad experience with the unique financing needs of life sciences companies, and regularly counsel clients regarding the options that best fit their strategic goals. This includes angel, venture capital, and mezzanine financing, as well as public and private offerings of equity, debt and equity-linked securities. Through years spent working in this sector, we have developed strong relationships with the investment banking and venture capital communities that we leverage on behalf of our clients.
Protecting Intellectual Property and Trade Secrets
Many of our life sciences company clients are founded upon novel, cutting-edge technology. Protecting and leveraging this valuable intellectual property plays a crucial role in developing and maintaining market share. Our team has a number of patent attorneys, many of whom hold doctoral or other advanced degrees in life sciences and biotech, who understand the unique needs of life sciences companies with respect to protecting IP. They have significant industry and research experience in areas that include genetics, biochemistry, cell and molecular biology, neuroscience, regulation of cell growth, oncogenesis, regulations of signal transduction pathways, pharmacology, microbiology, natural products biochemistry and general and organic chemistry. Our patent attorneys are skilled in virtually all technical disciplines, including biotechnology, materials sciences, pharmaceuticals, environmental sciences, physics, nuclear engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and the design arts.
We assist clients in managing all aspects of their IP portfolios, including patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets. Our attorneys regularly file domestic and international patent and trademark applications, and handle prosecution and post-issuance maintenance for many clients, including publicly traded companies with large portfolios. The firm has represented clients on intellectual property matters in more than 120 countries.
The team counsels clients regarding developing their businesses through the strategic use of intellectual property. This includes assisting with licensing, development, joint venture and technology transfer agreements, as well as confidentiality agreements, university-industry relations, and sponsored research projects. We also represent clients in enforcing their IP rights, providing seasoned litigation counsel as well as the full range of arbitration and mediation services to assist clients in resolving disputes effectively.
Resolving Disputes and Containing Risk
Bradley Arant Boult Cummings’ trial attorneys have a track record of creative lawyering and aggressive courtroom tactics that have assisted our life sciences clients in identifying and resolving litigation exposure.
We have aggressively defended our clients in individual, mass tort, class action and other complex litigation matters in state and federal courts, from inception through appeal. Over the last ten years, we have tried more than 200 cases to verdict in state and federal courts across the country. The types of matters we have handled cover a wide range and include pharmaceutical litigation, product liability, toxic tort, antitrust, intellectual property, general commercial litigation and appellate.
Our lawyers are experienced at dealing with the unique legal issues faced by companies in the industry, and have played a key role in developing and shaping this area of law. On a national level, in a seminal case concerning the scope of FDA preemption, we recently prevailed in federal court in Philadelphia in having claims against our client dismissed. On a local level, we represented a client before the Alabama Supreme Court in a matter that established a precedent limiting the ability to bring fraud claims against medical device and pharmaceutical companies.
We have served as national, regional or statewide counsel for a number of life sciences companies, including Bayer, Guidant, Merck, Pfizer, 3M/McGhan, Medtronic, and others. For some of these clients, such as Pfizer, we were selected from among more than 200 firms as one of a handful of firms officially designated as “partners” with the client in their pharmaceutical litigation matters. We are currently serving as national, regional and statewide counsel for Bayer and Pfizer for various pharmaceutical and medical products liability matters.
In mass tort litigation, we are one of the only firms in the country to have defended the last three major pharmaceutical product withdrawals--Rezulin on behalf of Pfizer, Baycol on behalf of Bayer, and Vioxx on behalf of Merck. For Bayer and Merck, our lawyers worked as part of a team of lawyers to handle national and international litigation issues.