On November 1, 2018, Lisa Jose Fales was recognized by the National Law Journal as a 2018 Trailblazer in Mergers & Acquisitions and Antitrust. Honorees are selected based on the significant impact and successes they've made in their legal work in the areas of deal making, restructuring, financing, and their deep passion and perseverance.
Following is an excerpt that highlights Lisa's professional achievements:
Fales joined Venable 14 years ago to head up the antitrust practice, which has a particular focus on health care and pharmaceuticals. On the pharmaceutical side, she has been working on reverse payment cases since 2006. "These are at the intersection of antitrust and IP." The U.S. Supreme Court's 2013 Actavis decision changed the legal standard for reverse patent cases from the scope of the patent to a rule of reason analysis. "They left it to the lower courts to figure it out. We've tried every case that has gone to trial since 2013, and we've seen judges struggle to apply the rule of reason analysis in these very complicated cases." The first tried case she tried involved Nexium. "We obtained a unanimous jury verdict. Since then we have had In re: Solodyn Antitrust Litigation, which went has gone to trial, then a trial case involving Modafinil." She is currently working on another Modafinil case. "These cases are important because they involve large MDLs that include putative massive class actions brought by direct and indirect purchases of the brand drug and competitors. This underscores how much the private bar can shape antitrust law."