Navigating high-stakes life science deals requires incisive due diligence to secure your investment or maximise your asset’s value. Our experienced team swiftly identifies critical IP issues and delivers clear and actionable advice. We deliver focused conclusions, providing you with the essential insights needed for confident and timely decisions, all without overwhelming you with irrelevant details.
In-licensing, acquisition, and other M&A activities in the life science sector demand critical due diligence. As a purchaser, it is essential that you understand the IP landscape surrounding a pharmaceutical asset before committing significant funds. For selling parties, ensuring your assets are optimally positioned from an IP perspective is key to maximising value. We are experienced in conducting due diligence for high value pharmaceutical assets and can support your due diligence needs. We identify key issues quickly and efficiently and provide actionable and pragmatic advice, generally under tight timelines.
We deliver clear, comprehensive IP analysis that highlights strengths and potential risks and can conduct thorough loss of exclusivity, validity, chain of title, and freedom to operate analysis, as well as review of IP provisions. We can assess the alignment between the company’s IP strategy and its business objectives, evaluate the robustness of its freedom-to-operate position, and identify opportunities to strengthen protection. Our attorneys have extensive experience communicating complex IP matters in terms that resonate with business leaders and stakeholders, ensuring you receive practical insights that support your decision-making process.
Rapid initial assessments
You may be looking for a rapid initial assessment of an asset based on public information to inform early-stage discussions, to sign a non-binding term sheet or to decide whether to invest more time evaluating an opportunity. We conduct a focused analysis, prioritising the key areas most likely to dictate the outcome, concentrating our efforts where it will yield the greatest impact. We work to defined budgets and timelines, giving you certainty over costs, timelines and deliverables and allowing you to gain key insights quickly.
In-depth analysis
When you need a detailed review to finalise a deal we can support you through this process. We have particular expertise in pharmaceutical and biotech drug development and commercialisation, regulatory exclusivities, PTE/SPC/paediatric extensions, litigation strategies, entitlement and other legal issues. We avoid impenetrable reports unable to differentiate real issues from noise to provide you with focused conclusions allowing you to make timely decisions.
Fractional IP counsel
Our fractional IP counsel model places a named senior patent attorney inside your team as your head of IP, so that the person who already knows your portfolio and pipeline can lead the diligence when a deal arrives, on either side of the table.
Why fractional IP counsel for due diligence? Diligence is faster and better when it is led by someone who already knows your portfolio. Our patent directors have bought and sold assets from inside pharma and biotech companies, and have the real-world industry experience that you only get working in-house to report risks in the way a deal team needs them. When the data room opens, they can scale up with our specialist team and Cassandra, which a traditional IP firm without that in-house perspective, or a consultant working alone, cannot match. Every finding is set within a global strategic approach to the asset.
Contact us today to discuss how our expertise can support your next life science transaction.
Evolve AI
Cassandra: Due diligence and IP contract review
Cassandra works through the deal information with us, so the risks are ranked before anyone signs.
IP sits at the heart of most biotech deals, and the diligence nearly always arrives with too little time attached. Cassandra keeps a single record of every fact, where it came from and how far it can be trusted, which leaves our attorneys free to spend the time on judgement rather than bookkeeping.
- Intake: the deal brief, then the data, worked through across product identity and the patent portfolio to ownership, key parties and agreements
- Analysis: coverage of the product claim by claim and country by country, validity from priority through to the data behind the claims, and the chain of title traced step by step
- Verdict: risks ranked by how serious they are, each with an owner, with the strength of the evidence graded separately from the size of the risk
Cassandra also reads the IP terms in commercial agreements and flags what the attorney should look at.
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