First up is a team from Williams & Connolly representing Teva Branded Pharmaceutical Products and Norton (Waterford) Ltd. in patent litigation concerning their Qvar asthma inhaler. After a bench trial last year, U.S. Judge Julien Xavier Neals found in a decision unsealed earlier this month that a proposed generic version of the inhaler from Cipla infringed all asserted claims of all the asserted patents. The judge also affirmed the validity of the underlying patents. The Williams & Connolly team on the matter includes David Berl, Benjamin Greenblum, Elise Baumgarten, Kathryn Kayali, Ben Picozzi and Ricardo Leyva.
Runners-up honors also go to Gary Naftalis, Mark Baghdassarian and their team at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel who scored a summary judgment win for client Sirius XM Radio Inc. in a patent suit originally brought against Sirius six years ago by Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Angewandten Forschung e.V., a research agency based in Germany. Senior U.S. District Judge Joseph Bataillon sitting by designation in Delaware found this week that Fraunhofer was equitably estopped from asserting patent infringement claims since it was silent about them for five years. That silence, the judge found, allowed SXM to reasonably believe it had a valid sublicense to the technology—and to build its satellite radio business based upon that assumption. The Kramer Levin team also included Alan Friedman, Jason Moff, Shannon Hedvat, Tobias Jacoby and Marcus Colucci.
