Product and Technology Licensing and Collaborations

Overview
Professionals

Overview

For many emerging companies in life science, health care IT, medical devices, or engineering technology, accelerating value creation by collaborating with other industry players is an important business strategy.

Collaborations are challenging to structure, and you need legal counsel who:

Thoroughly understand your intellectual property and the technology behind your R&D programs
Are business-savvy and can help create agreements that achieve your strategic, financial, and scientific goals
Have the practical and operational experience to identify and address issues that drive real world success
Can effectively represent, prioritize, and communicate your interests when negotiating with well-established counterparties

Experience

We’ve worked with 2,500+ clients in life science, health care IT, medical devices, and engineering technology. We have over a dozen lawyers focusing their practices on handling these kinds of transactions, and our life science practice is among the deepest and most comprehensive in the country. As a result, whatever your opportunity, we’re likely to have a senior lawyer who has recently handled comparable deals involving similar technology, industry segments, and client situations — very often with the same counterparties you’re talking to.

Further, many of our lawyers have worked in-house in your industry, giving them practical insight into how a contract will play out in the real world. Several of our professionals have been entrepreneurs and led venture-backed companies.

Our transactional experience includes:

Licensing for compounds, technology platforms, processes, know-how, and software
Selective licensing by application or territory
Evaluation and option arrangements
Alliances for discovery, co-development, and/or co-commercialization
Manufacturing and process/formulation collaborations
Promotion and distribution agreements

Focus

Most of our attorneys have managed in-house legal departments for Big Pharma, where they launched such partnerships and managed them throughout their life cycle. Several of us are former entrepreneurs whose business leadership resulted in successful collaborations.

A senior attorney will work closely with your scientific and business leaders to craft a strategic partnership that is “fit for purpose” — optimally designed to achieve your high priority R&D and commercial goals — while respecting your unique risk tolerance for key areas of business. We do this by considering whether each key term:

- Aligns (or misaligns) the interests of the parties;
- Maintains the necessary leverage to address and adapt flexibly to unforeseen developments and challenges; and
- Balances responsibility and risk with investment, control, and potential financial reward.

Comprehensive Foresight

These deals are about forging business relationships that last for years, and we understand where they can go wrong and how to negotiate terms that will help keep them on track. With on our extensive operational experience, we'll help you prioritize issues and account for the details that determine real world success.

We also have experience appropriately employing a wide variety of option-based and staged deal structures.

Our clients rely on us to provide sound business judgment, as well as legal advice, to manage or mitigate specific risks and challenges in these structures, such as a change of control or shifts in business and scientific priorities during the full deal lifecycle.