Overview
In the rapidly evolving life sciences sector, you need a trusted legal partner to deliver practical, cost-effective legal advice to support you at every stage - whether you're a startup or a multinational company.
With over 150 professionals in the Gowling WLG Life Sciences Group around the world, we have the technical understanding required to advise on the unique challenges you face throughout your life cycle.
We work with your business, intellectual property, human resource and regulatory teams to provide guidance and support in key areas of life sciences - from protecting and enforcing your ideas, clinical trial protocols, the drafting of clinical trial agreements and drug submissions to licensing, financing, employment and labour issues, resolving contractual disputes, research and development (R&D), pricing, reimbursement and more.
Fully immersed in the sector, many of us have life sciences-related degrees and have spent time in our careers as scientists. This means we have the hands-on experience to understand your operating environment, commercial needs and challenges.
A full service
The areas we cover include:
- Clinical trials and drug manufacturing agreements
- Contractual disputes relating to everything from material breach and commercially reasonable efforts, to termination and disputes concerning IP and license agreements
- Interpretation of contracts and maximising the commercial position while minimising risks of breach
- Drug pricing and reimbursement
- Freedom to operate opinions
- Labelling, advertising and distribution
- Licensing, development and commercialisation agreements
- Joint ventures
- Patent and brand protection and litigation
- Risk management, product liability and litigation
- Pharmaceutical services and healthcare
- Regulatory law
- Acquisitions, mergers spin-outs and disposals, fund structures and initial public offerings (IPOs)
- Tax
- Competition and antitrust
- Government relations
- Real estate transactions and support on day-to-day real estate management issues for life sciences occupiers.
Whether protecting and enforcing your intellectual property rights, structuring transactions to mitigate risk or going through a merger and acquisition, we help life sciences companies - including investors, underwriters, public issuers, innovative startups and global brands - realise their business objectives.
Looking out for you
Our team is there for yours when you need help to navigate a heavily regulated global landscape: professionals with the sector experience needed to respond to intellectual property (IP) threats quickly and effectively. We understand the challenge of recouping investment given the increasing costs to develop drugs and difficulty of getting new products to market.
Innovative products are the life-blood of many pharmaceutical companies. Protecting such products requires an intimate knowledge of both the procedural aspects and substantive case-law of patent courts.
Our IP litigators have decades of experience of highly technical patent disputes in the life sciences sector and an impressive record of achieving success. Whether small molecules, biologics, medical devices or a whole range of other patent types, our team has both the technical and legal background and experience to provide advice of the highest quality.
We also leverage our award-winning patent and trademark prosecution expertise in Canada, the Middle East, Singapore and China and work with a global network of firms to help clients manage their IP portfolios.
The combined experience of our life sciences transactions, patent disputes and contractual disputes expertise means we are well-placed to handle all types of contractual disputes for clients in this sector. As circumstances change over time, you may need to re-evaluate your long-term contractual agreements. Our global team of lawyers can advise on the interpretation of contracts and consider all potential angles if a dispute arises in order to work with you to achieve the best outcome.
Our team members are actively involved in bodies such as the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, BIOTECanada and the UK BioIndustry Association. Through this involvement, as well as regular contributions to the key professional publications, we are thought leaders on the latest issues.
Find out more
The advice you need when you need it: get in touch with a team that can truly help your business.
