NIPC News

Jane Lambert For the second year running, I have been invited to address C5's annual conference on Pharma & Biotech Litigation .  That conference will take place at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Amsterdam between 26 and 27 Feb 2019.  Last year I discussed the Supreme Court's decision in  Eli Lilly v Actavis UK Ltd and others   [2017] Bus LR 1731, [2017] UKSC 48, [2017] RPC 21 with partners from the Dutch and German offices of DLA.  This year I shall be sharing a platform with  Anna P. López Lozano  who is head of IP at Esteve in Barcelona on the topic of Maximizing IP Regulatory Rights.  I shall be talking about supplementary protection certificates, a topic that I have recently addressed in the context of Brexit in Patents of there is no Deal   3 Oct 2018 NIPC Brexit. Brexit is one of the key themes of the 2019 conference and there be a pre-conference workshop on the topic on 25 Feb 2019 entitled READY, STEADY, BREXIT...

Jane Lambert One of the most important cases of 2017 was the Supreme Court's decision in Eli Lilly v Actavis UK Ltd and Others   [2017] Bus LR 1731, [2017] UKSC 48.  That case is important for two reasons. First, it re-struck the balance that the law has to strike between the needs of inventors for reasonable protection for their inventions, competitors in the industry for certainty and clarity as to what they can and cannot do and the general the general public for reasonable competition much more favourably to inventors.  Secondly, the Court considered for the first time topics such as the "doctrine of equivalents" and "file wrapper estoppel" that are familiar to US judges and lawyers but not to their colleagues in this country. I wrote about that case in  The Supreme Court's Judgment in Eli Lilly v Actavis UK Ltd and Others: how to understand it and why it is important   13 July 2017 NIPC Law. My case note received a lot of hits and favoura...