Our first runners-up this week are Eric Dittmann, Joseph Profaizer and their team at Paul Hastings who represent Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma Corp. in a high-stakes royalty fight with Novartis involving the latter’s blockbuster drug Gilenya. Gilenya, which is used mostly to treat multiple sclerosis, includes the active ingredient fingolimod, a chemical compound developed and patented by Mitsubishi Tanabe. After an arbitration tribunal denied Novartis’s claims that it didn’t owe royalty payments, Mitsubishi Tanabe last week reported revenue of 126 billion yen, or about $939 million, in past royalties and 3 billion yen, or about $22 million, in arbitration-related costs. The Paul Hastings team on the matter also includes partners Young Park, Joshua Bennett, Steve Kinnaird, Chad Peterman, of counsel Adam Weiss, and associates Sachiko Taniguchi, Becky Hilgar, Matthew Morantz and Ryan Meuth.
Runners-up honors also go to Dennis Hranitzky, Debra O’Gorman and Jianjian Ye of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan in Washington, D.C. last week entered judgment enforcing an arbitration award of more than $486 million against the Republic of Djibouti on behalf of their client, Doraleh Container Terminal, or DCT—a joint venture between Djibouti’s port authority and the Dubai-based logistic company DP World created to operate a port facility on the Red Sea. The judge rejected Djibouti’s arguments that DCT was unauthorized to proceed with its arbitration claims without signoff from its provisional administrator, who had been appointed by the government in the wake of a dispute over the management of the facility.
