Legal News

New Deal: Stent Makers Getting Settlement Fever

By Ashby Jones

Jeez. Doesn’t the medical-device industry care about its lawyers?! The last thing the struggling legal industry needs now is a glut of huge stent settlements. After all, the patent battles over heart stents — tiny devices used to prop open diseased arteries — have been keeping some BigLaw patent lawyers and litigators in the black for over a decade.

But alas, it seems a wave of hatchet-burying has come across device-makers. Boston Scientific recently settled a bunch of litigation with Medtronic. Then, in July, Medtronic agreed to pay Abbott Laboratories $400 million to settle their stent battles.

And on Tuesday came word of another settlement. Boston Scientific Corp. agreed to pay $716 million to Johnson & Johnson to settle 14 lawsuits (14 lawsuits!) over conflicting patent claims, including one that had resulted in a verdict in favor of J&J that Boston Scientific had appealed. Click here for the WSJ story; here for the Boston Globe story.

The deal resolves most of Boston Scientific’s legal liability to J&J after 12 years of lawsuits over stents. At least three suits between the two companies remain unresolved.

Boston Scientific is the sales leader in cardiac stents, which have grown into a $4 billion market. But J&J controls the original patent on the devices, via rights it acquired from the radiologist Julio Palmaz, who is generally credited with the invention.

In the last several years, explosive growth of stents has slowed, as some scientific studies have questioned their benefit. Major manufacturers of stents, including Medtronic Inc. and Abbott Laboratories, have filed patent lawsuits against one another, several of which have recently been settled.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on September 30, 2009 (boomark / email).