A well-established medical device company was engaged in a significant research and development (R&D) effort to bring a new device to market. The effort was expected to take close to a decade and cost tens of millions of dollars in R&D expense. However, the medical device space is highly competitive and dominated by several large companies with extensive patent portfolios and patent litigation experience. Additionally, U.S. courts are more likely to impose injunctions against the sale of products in the medical device field than other fields. Our client faced significant risk to their gross margin from licensing fees and potential catastrophic risk from an injunction.

The client hired our team to assess and quantify the risk, develop mitigation strategies, and then execute the strategies. We developed a landscape of relevant patents, assessed the portfolios of the primary competitive threats, built a risk model to determine the potential exposure of our client, the likelihood of an injunction, and the ability of our client to offset the risks. Based on our client’s R&D timeline, existing patent portfolio, market projections, competitor landscape, and the model, we developed strategic recommendations for risk mitigation. Subsequently, we assisted our client in executing our recommendations with the acquisition of third-party patent portfolios.

Note: This work was performed prior to joining Stout.