Kilpatrick Townsend hires litigation team from DLA Piper

Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton has strengthened its life sciences expertise with the addition of a patent litigation team, that includes four litigators from DLA Piper.

Abby Markeson most recently worked at Fitzpatrick, Cella, Harper & Scinto in New York, while April Isaacson, Brian O'Reilly, Michael Furrow, and Erica Ku join from DLA Piper.

Isaacson, who joins the firm as a partner in San Francisco, has more than 25 years of experience as a trial lawyer, with particular expertise in Hatch-Waxman cases. She previously practised at a predecessor firm of Kilpatrick Townsend from 2002 to 2007.

In New York, O'Reilly and Furrow will join the team as partners. O'Reilly has nearly 20 years of experience representing innovators in patent disputes and is a first-chair trial attorney, handling both bench and jury trials.

Furrow leads patent disputes on behalf of pharmaceutical and biotech innovators. Over the past 13 years, he has handled actions concerning drugs for more than a dozen therapeutic indications and covering all stages of drug discovery.

Kuo also joins the team in New York as counsel, focusing her practice on patent portfolio strategy and related counselling for innovator life sciences companies. She regularly provides opinions on issues of freedom to operate, patentability/validity, and loss of exclusivity.

As counsel in Seattle, Markeson will split her practice between Hatch-Waxman litigation and related strategic counselling, and patent due diligence investigations for major biopharma transactions.

Wab Kadaba, chair of Kilpatrick Townsend’s IP department, said: “They bring valuable Hatch-Waxman and biologics/biosimilars expertise and will provide clients with additional capabilities in our already strong life sciences patent litigation and strategic counselling practices.”

Did you enjoy reading this story?  Sign up to our free daily newsletters and get stories sent like this straight to your inbox.