First up this week are Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler patent litigators Barbara Mullin, Aron Fischer and Andrew Cohen. You might remember that back in 2021 Mullin took home Litigator of the Week honors for fending off a generic drug maker's patent challenge to Janssen's Invega Sustenna, an antipsychotic drug with more than $1.5 billion in annual sales. In a decision made public this week, Mullin and a trial team co-led by Fischer and Cohen got a ruling from U.S. District Judge Evelyn Padin in New Jersey in a similar case preserving patent protection for Janssen's Invega Trinza, a long-acting injectable antipsychotic drug used to treat schizophrenia which generates about $600 million in annual sales in the U.S. The judge's ruling, which comes after a two-week bench trial last year and closing arguments this spring, bars the FDA from approving a proposed generic from Mylan until Janssen's patent expires—a date currently set for April 5, 2036. The Patterson Belknap team also included Lachlan Campbell-Verduyn, Jay Cho, Joyce Nadipuram and Robert Quirk.

Katherine "Kat" Hacker of Bartlit Beck and co-counsel Christine Miller at Husch Blackwell extended Bayer's defense win streak to seven trials in a row in cases where plaintiffs claim the herbicide Roundup caused their non-Hodgkin lymphoma. After a six-week trial and about five hours of deliberations, jurors in Clayton, Missouri this week sided with the company and turned back the plaintiff's design defect, failure to warn and negligence claims. The Bartlit Beck team also included Mark Ouweleen, Lindley Brenza, Reid Bolton and Dawson Robinson. 

A trial team at Hunton Andrews Kurth and Prickett, Jones & Elliott helped Rite Aid beat back claims brought by a group of insurance and pharmacy benefit companies seeking more than $100 million for alleged overcharges. Envolve Pharmacy Solutions Inc. and the Centene Health Plans claimed Rite Aid submitted "inflated" usual and customary prices in claims for reimbursement for prescription drugs. But after two weeks of trial and about two-and-a-half hours of deliberations, a jury in Wilmington, Delaware state court this week found that a three-year statute of limitations applied to certain older claims, that Rite Aid was not unjustly enriched, and that the claims of the Centene plaintiffs were barred by Delaware's voluntary payment doctrine. Rite Aid's trial team was led by John Shely, Courtney Glaser and Kelsey Hope of Hunton Andrews Kurth as well as Corinne Amato and Jason Rigby of Prickett, Jones & Elliott. The trial team had additional support from Neil Gilman, Chris Dufek, Destiny Stokes and Rebecca Martinez of Hunton Andrews Kurth as well as Eric Juray from Prickett, Jones & Elliott.