Fish & Richardson Principals Juanita Brooks and Dorothy Whelan Named "2017 MVPs of the Year" by Law360

Fish & Richardson attorneys Juanita Brooks and Dorothy Whelan have been named "2017 MVPs of the Year" by Law360. Brooks was named an "Intellectual Property MVP of the Year" and Whelan was named a "Life Sciences MVP of the Year." Brooks and Whelan were among an "elite slate" of MVPs chosen from more than 1,000 submissions.

Brooks, who has led more than 150 trials in her career, was selected for her impressive IP trial wins over the past year including a victory in May 2017 for long-time client Microsoft against Parallel Networks, a well-known patent assertion entity alleging infringement of two patents that involved webpage loading. The jury returned a verdict for Microsoft in under one hour. In June 2017, Brooks won a $235 million jury verdict for GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) against Teva Pharmaceuticals in a patent infringement lawsuit involving GSK's highly successful drug Coreg, used to treat congestive heart failure and hypertension. She scored $14 million in attorneys' fees for client Gilead Sciences in July 2017, after earlier proving litigation and business misconduct by Merck that wiped out a $200 million infringement verdict against Gilead.

Whelan, who co-chairs the Post-Grant Practice at Fish, won three much-heralded inter partes reviews (IPRs) for Coherus BioSciences in 2017 that invalidated three patents covering competitor AbbVie's blockbuster biologic drug Humira^®. These were the first-ever IPR decisions that invalidated patents for AbbVie's biologic, which was the highest-selling drug in 2016 with $16 billion in global sales. The Coherus case was the most closely watch life sciences IPR of the year because of the broader implications for the entire biosimilar industry. Whelan's work is now a model for how other biosimilar patents can be successfully attacked and challenged.