Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Attack like a tiger and retreat like a kitten. You screen name makes sense now.
What I mean is that you have not gone to the SEC because there’s no basis for doing so, but your emotional self dreams about doing so.
Apparently not
Have you gone to the SEC with your complaint?
There’s two sides to every trade my friend, and its the long term value proposition that really matters here.
Sorry, but you are giving way too much significance to a single federal district court decision and its short term effects on this stock. I get that emotions run high when paper value gets destroyed by a flawed legal decision. But investment decisions should not be based on emotion. Nor should they be based in “sure thing”assumptions in the face of a highly contested litigation. If you made bad or unhedged investment decisions, might be time to look in the mirror, instead of lashing out at the courts and those that look at the legal system more objectively than you are able.
Why not?
MJ—
I predict that if we get a reversal along these lines there will be an outpouring of sentiment that the court system worked and fixed the problem resulting from the trial court’s subpar work.
People with a financial stake in the outcome are poor judges of the integrity and reliability of the legal system. The human desire to blame others for wrongs they suffer is universal.
B
zip—
That is why the party claiming invalidity in this kind of case has to prove obviousness by clear and convincing evidence. I continue to think that the most likely path for the CTA to reverse is to say the evidence relied on by the trial court was not strong enough to show obviousness was clear and convincing.
B
WORST IDEA OF THE CENTURY
Ditto. ST
I CITE THE CASE OF GOOSE V. GANDER
GG—be more specific please. Principal brief or Reply Brief, and page no.
This is critical stuff for us and the court.
Best
B
No, but he did say there was nothing in the pre-patent literature about what the impact would be of EPA on LDL cholesterol patients above 500 per deciliter.
EIGHT—
Markman’s analysis simply reflects that judges get their evidence concerning science points in a trial from expert witnesses. Not from their own scientific research. Appeals courts generally do not second guess a trial court’s judgment whether to credit one expert over another. There has to be basically nothing backing up the expert’s opinion in the science to reject it, which is what AMRN has to argue.
B
Zip—you are spot on my friend. “Clear and compelling” is going to play a big role in the appeals court decision. It is a middle standard of proof between “preponderance of the evidence,” and “beyond a reasonable doubt.” To meet the preponderance standard, you only need to be able to make some down weight on a scales of justice to win, e.g., more probable than not. To meet a beyond a reasonable doubt standard, you have to be able to eliminate any reasonable doubt as to the ultimate question. Clear and compelling means you have to show your position is highly probable.
Appeals courts play very close at attention to the standard of proof at trial. There is some evidence in the record to support every finding made by Judge Du. Probably enough to meet a preponderance of evidence standard. The question is whether that evidence shows in a clear and convincing way that a POSA would have had a reason to be confident that 4g of pure EPA would reduce TGs without raising DHA in the severely high trig population. AMRNs appellate counsel has done an excellent job of explaining why the evidence available to a POSA was at best uncertain as to whether any TRIG lowering drug could do that job without raising LDL.
The generics did a very good job of showing there was some reason to study if pure EPA might reduce trigs without raising LDL, but they did not show that a POSA would have thought it was “highly probable” that this would be the effect of 4g of EPA in this population.
This will be the CTA rationale for reversing in my judgment.
JMO.
B
As stated on this board before, the Bhaat paper was not presented at trial and is not in the appeal record.
It’s a separate presidential appointment to CJ
Well I guess we will see what the CTA has to say about that pretty soon.
That’s the best Clint Eastwood I can do in text alone.
B
Ditto
Generally, Nothing will get the attention of the court other than filings by parties and amici. They and their clerks may do outside reading because they are curious humans, but they all take their duty to decide the case based on the record alone VERY SERIOUSLY.
Blue—
The reality is that you can turn a vote at oral argument some of the time, depending on the strength of the advocacy. Probably less so in the federal circuit because they hear a much more limited docket than other CTA, which hear everything from federal criminal to social security to tort cases. The federal Circuit is the most specialized of all the federal Courts of Appeal. All the other CTA courts are true generalist courts, so I would say odds are higher to turn a vote in some other CTA than the Fed. Cir. That said, you only need to turn one vote on a three judge panel, so oral argument is that much more important at the CTA level.
Justice Ginsburg was right when she said it’s very hard to win a case on oral argument, but you can lose one. Here, AMRN has the burden to show reversible error by the trial court, so it will be on the offensive. Generics will be playing defense to try to justify the decision. Not sure about you all, but I always prefer to be on the offensive when the stakes are high. This adds 10-15 percent to my assessment of AMRN’s chance of prevailing.
B
JL—
Glad to see you clarify your point and that you are not saying the decision was the result of a corrupt judge taking a payoff because she comes from a country that values the payoff above all else.
Nuff said.
B
No but I have also never spent time in the many other countries around the world where corruption is endemic. This does not keep me from feeling quite certain that not every person that grew up in any of those countries is corrupt enough to accept a bribe to fix a US federal trial.
Then it should hit PACER by no later than the end of the last day to file. Could be after business hours.
JL—
No need to make any of this personal, but since you did, let me say that it is actually you that has offered a most convoluted and implausible reason for the Du decision: because she is Vietnamese and because of that country’s tortured history she must have accepted a payoff to hand the case to the generics. What?
Judges all around the country issue incorrect decisions every day, and appeals courts exist to fix those wrong decisions as best they can. This mistakes get made by trial judges for a myriad of reasons. And in a few instances judges take payoffs, but that is very rare in this country, most especially federal judges.
I agree with you that the decision smells results oriented and I think the CTA will pick up on this. Good for us and AMRN.
But you are way off in attributing the decision to the corrupt tendencies you see in people of the judge’s ethnicity.
That’s the last I have to say about this point.
B
JL—
WADR, what I do not get about your Vietnamese heritage thesis is that Judge DU’s decision actually favored well established and large generic drug companies that are bigger than AMRN, which has more of a start up, small company profile. So the big money won with her decision.
Perhaps you could say the judge was out to help consumers, but what would she know about the pricing differential, which is not even a known until the generics can launch.
The economic realities do not square with the thesis as far as I can tell.
B
JL—appreciate the analysis, but isn’t it also a factor that Gen L has to be taken with a statin to avoid LDL increase? Would not most patients and their docs opt for a single generic pill that does not have the LDL problem (generic V)?
Thanks
B
The CDC is not political. If you think otherwise, god help you.
JL—
In my experience (I have handled probably 50 appeals in my career and been a judicial clerk for a state Supreme Court) appellate judges are expert at sniffing out trial court decisions that are products of a bias toward a particular outcome. Remember these people are top of their game at not only patent law but at finding errors made by trial courts. The Du decision in my view was a result looking for a rationale. I think they will see this, which gives me confidence in the appeal.
I also understand how the whole system can seem like a farce when decisions like this get made.
Keeping the faith.....
B
JL—
I don’t agree with this totally negative assessment as to the legal system. I think the vast majority of judges work hard to be fair and impartial in their work. But they are humans and bias is no doubt a factor in some. I agree Judge Du was biased toward an outcome and made a decision showing the bias, which should actually help AMRN on appeal. Appeals courts exist to protect the system from decisions based on such biases. I believe AMRN will get a fair shake on appeal.
B
has a
ILT—
The point is it is not new evidence. It is a point of interpretation (based on statistical analysis) of the earlier EPA studies that was not argued at trial.
In a criminal case, it would be like trying to bring in a new expert after the trial to show it was not actually the defendants fingerprints on the murder weapon.
B
RAF—
50
25
15
10
Talk to your congressman. That is where the real power lies. The courts just apply the law the best they can, sometimes with messy results.
BB—good luck with that.
Best
B
BB—my advice is to take one step at a time and not get wrapped up in assigning blame based on limited information. We do not know who is responsible for what decisions. The company has highly paid in house counsel that likely made the calls on key decisions, but even then, management does not always follow advice of in house counsel. JT can make decisions against advice of in house counsel, although that would be rare. You know and I know that they (and us) are all working to the same goal, so let’s keep our collective minds in that place.
Best
B
HD—we can assume that the AMRN team pulled any and all relevant evidence from the record.
Cases get decided based on the record, not the emotions and frustrations of the party (or its shareholders) that lost at trial.
Best
B
Lem—appreciate your perspective, but the danger is that others lose sight of the rules that govern appeals. The judge here was acting as both fact finder and arbiter of the applicable legal rules. As fact finder, a federal judge is not presumed to be any more educated on things like statistical analysis of the results of scientific studies than a normal lay jury. It is up to the parties to present evidence to the court on their case. That is the most fundamental rule of trials in our system.
My only other point is we should all try to take emotion out of this, and look at it from a purely intellectual perspective, as hard as that is. I can guarantee you the court of appeals will approach it that way.
Best—
B
RAF—all I can say is that if it was a blank and white math issue, you can be sure it would have been in the principal appeal brief.
Best,
B
MS—the reality is that appellate judges put their pants on one leg at a time, just like the rest of us. The state Supreme Court justice I worked for taught me that lesson in the 80s when I was a clerk. They are interested in the big picture on any case, while still restricted by the rules of appellate procedure to consider only what was presented and admitted into evidence at trial. I have had a appellate judges ask me questions that invite responses based on non-record information. It happens.
So there is some room in the process for basic fairness and equity to play a role, beyond the technical rules. But you never want to rely on that alone. The extent to which anything outside the record comes to influence the decision will also depend on the panel, of course.
Best-
B
MAR—correct on all fronts. I guess the way I see it is that it certainly does not hurt to have all of this great thinking happening and funneled to the appeal team in a constructive way. Whether it actually makes a difference in outcome is a much tougher question on which reasonable people can disagree.
What I don’t think is a debatable point is that the thinking and sharing going on here is a big help to me in evaluating the investment decisions I will make going into the next few months. I suspect most others agree. My thanks to all contributors who add to the understanding of the issues.
B