Legal Malpractice

Plagiarism and Legal Malpractice?

By (Andrew Lavoott Bluestone)

Plagiarism is the act of appropriating the intellectual property of others and passing the material off as one's own creation [Webster, 2009] is a subject we thought was left behind in school.  Really, all one needs to do is use a pair of quotation marks and a few words which say that we were clever enough to find someone else's better composition.  Here, in a NYLJ article we see a multi-million dollar plagiarism-legal malpractice law suit against the IP firm Ropes & Grey.  Here, with proper attribution is the story by Nate Raymond:

"Vladimir Drozdoff had just started working at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory when he was asked to investigate why a patent had been denied for what the lab considered a genetics breakthrough.

Cold Spring, the former home of DNA researcher James Watson, is well known for genetics research. But the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2007 denied one of its top scientists, Gregory Hannon, a patent for technology that would allow researchers to selectively turn off genes.

Mr. Drozdoff's probe led him to conclude that Matthew Vincent, a partner at Cold Springs' outside counsel Ropes & Gray, had plagiarized a patent by a rival researcher. Mr. Drozdoff, a former senior IP associate at Kaye Scholer, discovered that 11 pages of text in Mr. Hannon's patent application had been lifted without citation directly from one by Andrew Fire, a Nobel Prize winner in medicine. Many of Mr. Hannon's other patent applications contained similar copied passages.

In February, Cold Spring sued Ropes & Gray in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District, accusing the firm and Mr. Vincent of malpractice. Cold Spring, represented by Chad Ziegler at Scully Scott Murphy & Presser in Garden City, claims it has lost millions of dollars in potential licensing and royalty revenue, and seeks $37.5 million to $82.5 million, plus punitive damages.

Ropes & Gray, in a motion to dismiss 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."

Full post as published by New York Attorney Malpractice Blog on March 26, 2010 (boomark / email).