Defense lawyers have 30 days to whittle down their 13 voluminous expert reports to the essential points before the federal judge overseeing the case decides who will be allowed to testify to what at trial.

U.S. District Judge Mitchell S. Goldberg of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, who is handling the case filed by the Federal Trade Commission and competing pharmaceutical companies against Cephalon and four generic drugmakers over their alleged reverse-payment settlements, asked the defense lawyers to distill the reports into seven-to-10 paragraph abstracts for the court to review.

He made the request toward the end of a Daubert hearing, which allows parties in a case to challenge expert testimony before the start of trial and is named for the 1993 U.S. Supreme Court case Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, on Monday.