Litigation & Investigations

The Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) last week green-lighted Medtronic, Inc.’s (“Medtronic”) $42.9 billion acquisition of Covidien plc (“Covidien”) after Medtronic agreed to a settlement that requires Medtronic to divest its drug-coated balloon catheter products to Spectranetics, a Colorado-based medical technology company.

On November 20, 2014, the Federal Circuit issued its decision in Versata Software, Inc. v. Callidus Software, Inc. reversing the district court’s denial of a motion to stay pending a Covered Business Method (“CBM”) review of the patents asserted by Versata in the action.

Directors of an insolvent corporation face a host of difficult questions. Should they wind up operations or file for bankruptcy to preserve assets for creditors, or chart a riskier course that could lead the company back to profitability and possibly create value for shareholders?

The Tenth Circuit recently affirmed both class certification and one of the largest verdicts issued in the U.S. this year, denying Dow Chemical Company’s (“Dow”) appeal in a price fixing case related to polyurethane products.

In recent years, antitrust criminal enforcement efforts have increased around the world. These efforts focus mainly on cartels — which the Supreme Court calls “the supreme evil of antitrust” — that conspire to fix prices, rig bids, or allocate markets.

In a noteworthy recent decision addressing the parameters of damages in commercial litigation, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) affirmed an order excluding expert testimony concerning future lost profits damages relating to “yet-to-be conceived future products.”

On February 19, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held that state-action immunity does not protect a state-created hospital authority from antitrust scrutiny over a proposed hospital merger where the anticompetitive effect of such merger was not a “foreseeable result” authorized by the state. FTC v. Phoebe Putney Health System, Inc., 568 U.S. ___ (2013).

The California Supreme Court, in Aryeh v. Canon Business Solutions, Inc., 2013 WL 263509 (January 24, 2013), resolved a split in the lower appellate courts over the applicability of common law rules of accrual to the statute of limitations in California’s Unfair Competition Law (Cal. B&P Code § 17200, “UCL”).