Life Sciences Group Of The Year: Covington & Burling
February 10, 2017, Law360
Law360 selected Covington’s Life Sciences practice as a “Practice Group of the Year,” highlighting the firm’s involvement in billion-dollar transactions, success in contentious litigation, and regulatory advice on cutting-edge technology. According to Michael Labson, “What we offer and bring to complicated, complex issues is a mixture of deep subject-matter expertise — because we’ve been working on these regulatory issues for decades — combined with people that have been in government recently and can bring inside, unique perspectives on these issues.”
Commenting on the firm’s success on behalf of Eli Lilly in a lawsuit over the alleged withdrawal effects of Cymbalta, Michael Imbroscio says that the clean sweep across the board “really reflects Covington’s ability to think strategically about a litigation — to press the right legal theories at the right time and ultimately, if necessary, to try the case before a jury.”
According to Scott Danzis, a partner in the firm’s Food & Drug and Health Care practice groups, “The law changes with the science and the law changes with the technology, so we’re constantly trying to take new technology and say, ‘how does this fit into the regulatory paradigm that the FDA has and how could this change the regulatory paradigm the FDA has?’” He adds, “It’s constantly a new puzzle and opportunity to help our clients.”
Speaking about size and breadth of the practice, John Hurvitz, co-chair of the firm's Life Sciences Industry Group, states, “We’ve really made a big investment as a firm, and it’s one of our priorities to have this practice and have it be comprehensive and be global.” Recalling a conversation with a client, Hurvitz says, “They once said to me, ‘I always know that whenever there’s a new thing I’ve never seen before, I can call Covington and they will have seen it and they’ll know what to do with it.’” He adds, “And that’s often the case. We have seen it. We do know what to do.”
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