Antitrust

Nashville General v. Momenta Pharmaceuticals, et al., No. 3:15-cv-01100 (M.D. Tenn.)

Lieff Cabraser represents AFCSME DC 37, a municipal union health and welfare fund headquartered in New York City, and the Nashville General Hospital (the Hospital Authority of Metropolitan Government of Nashville) in a class-action antitrust case against defendants Momenta Pharmaceuticals and Sandoz, Inc., for their alleged monopolization of enoxaparin, the generic version of the anti-coagulant blood clotting drug Lovenox.

Lovenox, developed by Sanofi-Aventis, is a highly profitable drug with annual sales of more than $1 billion. The drug entered the market in 1995 and its patent was invalidated by the federal government in 2008, making generic production possible.

The complaint alleged that defendants colluded to secretly bring the official batch-release testing standard for generics within the ambit of their patent, delaying the entry of the second generic competitor—a never-before-tried theory of liability.

In 2019, the court certified a class of hospitals, third-party payors, and uninsured persons in 29 states and DC, appointing Lieff Cabraser sole lead counsel. In 2019, the parties agreed to a proposed settlement totaling $120 million, the second largest indirect-purchaser antitrust pharmaceutical settlement fund in history, after Cipro. On May 29, 2020, the Court granted final approval to the settlement.