Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a genetics-research laboratory, is suing Ropes & Gray, alleging the firm’s plagiarism on a patent application caused it to be rejected.
The lab claims that failure cost it $37.5 to $82.5 million in damages from potential lost licensing and royalty revenue, and it wants punitives, too.
Maybe they’ll get some sympathy from Dickstein Shapiro.
Details, including a call to Doctor Love, after the jump.
First, let’s understand how it was discovered:
Drozdoff’s probe led him to conclude that Matthew Vincent, a partner at Cold Spring’s outside counsel Ropes & Gray, had plagiarized a patent by a rival researcher. Drozdoff, a former senior IP associate at Kaye Scholer, discovered that 11 pages of text in Hannon’s patent application had been lifted without citation directly from one by Andrew Fire, a Nobel Prize winner in medicine. Many of Hannon’s other patent applications contained similar copied passages.
Drozdoff is Vladimir Drozdoff, senior licensing associate and patent attorney at the lab (Bowdoin BA ’79, Cornell PhD (biophysics) ’88, Vanderbilt JD ’98). He has also spent time at Clifford Chance (joining from legacy Rogers & Wells).
The reason we say plagiarism is tough to prove is that as far as we know, it simply doesn’t outside of academics and publishing. Lawyers copy all the time. It’s called using precedents. Maybe we’re spoiled because we make the rules, but clients benefit from not having lawyers reinvent the wheel and the industry benefits from creating a pool of “tried and true” phrases.
Ropes & Gray, in a motion to dismiss (pdf) filed Tuesday, contends the alleged copying was not the cause of the rejection of the applications. “Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s lawsuit lacks merit because the determination of the [Patent and Trademark Office] to reject the patent applications is based on the existence of prior work of other respected scientists and not on our firm’s efforts,” the firm said in a statement. Ropes & Gray argues it is “perfectly ethical and legal” to copy text from others’ patents.
That being said, copying a competitor’s materials on a patent application, where you’re trying to demonstrate novelty probably isn’t the best choice of source material.
Ropes & Gray has contended that copying text is an accepted practice. In a June 2008 letter (pdf) to Cold Spring, Eric Hubbard, a partner at Ropes & Gray, argued that Vincent had not committed malpractice, claiming it was common practice within the patent bar to include text from previously published patents or applications.
“Indeed, incorporating such text, either directly or with slight modification, in patent applications without specific attribution is often done to expediently provide descriptive information such as definitions, lists, descriptions of uses or other information that may be relevant to the invention disclosed in the application,” Hubbard wrote.
Hubbard (Hope BA ’84, Michigan JD ’87) joined Ropes in 2005 from Fish & Neave (RIP).
The firm claims that even if the application was plagiarized, the underlying idea wasn’t novel, so no patent was going to issue anyway.
But the lab isn’t willing to give up. They’ve brought in Wilmer Hale to try to resuscitate the application.
In August 2008, Jane Love, the vice chair of WilmerHale’s IP department, filed with the patent office a series of affidavits from Cold Spring lawyers and Hannon seeking to disclose the plagiarism. Love, in a letter to the patent office, wrote that any prior statements made in prosecuting this and other patent applications for Hannon were done without his or other Cold Spring researchers’ knowledge.
They’ve called in the Doctor! Doctor Love! (Penn BA ’87, PhD (Molecular Biology) ’93, Fordham JD ’99)
As if that weren’t enough, then things take a turn for the salacious.
Meanwhile, Ropes & Gray last year fired Vincent after discovering that a patent database company that billed the firm and its clients more than $730,000 was secretly owned by Vincent.
Vincent, who was based in Boston, resigned from the Massachusetts Bar in July (pdf) with charges pending by the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers.
What’s going on with this guy?
Related posts:
{ 2 trackbacks }