Behind the Case: How Covington & Burling Helped Overturn $107M Jury Verdict
August 21, 2024, Managing IP
Managing IP featured Megan Keane, Christopher Sipes, and Kaveh Saba in a Q&A interview on their representation of AstraZeneca, where they secured a major victory on behalf of the company when a judge overruled a decision that would have required it to pay more than $100 million to a competitor.
Christopher noted that “we have a long relationship with AstraZeneca; we've defended other products of theirs from [patent infringement] allegations, so they turned to us.” Commenting on the team’s strategy, he added that “we went into the trial recognizing that in addition to trying to win before the jury and minimize damages, we needed to build a record that would show invalidity as a matter of law.”
Kaveh said, “In this [kind of] high-stake case, you need a multifaceted team. You're trying to minimize the exposure the client may have if the trial doesn't go your way, minimize damages and avoid willfulness [findings] – which we were able to do successfully in this trial. And we have really strong writers and were focusing on our written submissions. So, we were ready to go when that time came, and that ultimately proved successful.”
Megan also told Managing IP how they put together the team for the case and prepared for oral arguments, saying that “we focused on putting together a bench of lawyers who had a fair amount of trial experience, so we could really prepare for what was going to be a hard-fought case. We knew that we were going to focus on what story we wanted to tell, and we wanted people prepared to do that if and when this case ultimately went to trial. […] We had a lot of people who had a lot of experience. If there were disputes about evidentiary issues, we had people lined up to handle those. As people were responsible for their witnesses, they were thinking through what objections might come up and being prepared to make sure they could handle them.”
Back
