Life Sciences Practice
Bradley Arant’s Life Sciences Practice Group provides a wide range of legal services to clients in the pharmaceutical, medical device, biotechnology, and healthcare industries. We have represented clients from multinational pharmaceutical and device manufacturers to emerging businesses in the biotechnology field, to major teaching hospitals and research centers, to health care service providers of various disciplines and sizes. We work on behalf of clients across the United States and around the world.
At Bradley Arant, we take a cross-discipline approach to the representation of our clients in the life sciences industry, calling upon the years of experience of attorneys across the firm. Our robust practice involves all of the disciplines necessary to serve the multilevel needs of companies, inventors, investors and institutions involved in life sciences.
We work with these clients at every phase of their growth cycle, including formation and financing of early-stage ventures; angel financing; venture capital financings; technology transfer; structuring and negotiating out-licenses and in-licenses; clinical trials agreements; research and development collaborations; protecting and defending intellectual property rights; structuring initial public offerings; defending claims of personal injury; labor and employment issues, and siting, permitting, developing and financing new or expanding facilities.
We draw on extensive scientific and legal expertise to provide the highest level of services to our clients. This base of scientific and legal understanding ensures our attorneys understand each client’s unique issues and challenges in the life science industry and allows us provide a range of options for moving forward. Bradley Arant provides a single point of access to a fully integrated suite of services for the industry.
Business Organization, Growth and Operations
No where does Bradley Arant’s reputation as top-ranked corporate and securities counselors become more obvious than in our work with life sciences companies on the formation and growth of their business and operations. We have guided clients from the protection of initial discoveries all the way through million-dollar strategic alliances.
Our lawyers work with early-stage and established companies to determine their goals and then to evaluate, select and the appropriate business entity.
Raising Capital and Financing
Ready access to capital is key to growing a life sciences company. Creative financing offers the liquidity needed to fuel continued growth. Bradley Arant assists life sciences companies in finding and securing funding by providing guidance and identifying and introducing capital investors. We leverage our relationships with venture capital and investment banking communities, and help clients raise capital through public and private offerings of equity, debt and equity-linked securities.
We assist with raising and documenting private and public capital, including angel financings, venture capital financings and public offerings.
Protecting Intellectual Property and Trade Secrets
The protection and exploitation of intellectual property is a key strategy for the success of cutting-edge companies such as those in the life sciences industry. Our patent professionals 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.
Our firm took the lead in establishing the Partnership for Biotechnology Research and the Biotechnology Association of Alabama, both nonprofit organizations dedicated to enhancing biotechnology and the life sciences industry. Our attorneys are also active in Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO). Bradley Arant attorneys have served in leadership positions in many of these nonprofit biotechnology organizations and are active in shaping and directing the growth of the biotechnology and life sciences.
The life sciences experience of our intellectual property lawyers extends to all aspects of intellectual property law from patents to copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets. Several of our patent lawyers hold doctoral or other advanced degrees in diverse fields within the biological and life sciences area and 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.
We have significant experience handling all facets of client IP portfolio matters. We regularly file domestic and International patent and trademark applications, and handle prosecution and post-issuance maintenance, for many clients, including publicly-traded entities with large portfolios.
Our lawyers provide counseling to clients regarding development of business strategies and advise our clients in all manner of agreements necessary for our clients to achieve their goals, such as licensing agreement, confidentiality agreements, university-industry relations, sponsored research projects, development agreements, joint ventures and technology transfer agreements. Our lawyers also advise and counsel clients regarding enforcement of intellectual property rights including patent, trademark and copyright litigation and apply our industry specific knowledge to aid in the resolutions of such disputes.
Resolving Disputes and Containing Risk
Bradley Arant’s 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.
