Siegmund Y. Gutman

Proskauer Rose LLP

Los Angeles

Patent litigation

Gutman has an impressive list of academic acronyms on his resume: J.D., B.A., M.A.

He also has an unwritten one that's less sought after: A.B.D., as in "all but dissertation." But things have worked out pretty well for him anyway.

"I didn't finish my dissertation, but I went through the entire Ph.D. program," Gutman said. "It was my experience in graduate school that caused me to go to law school."

Studying molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley, Gutman had a bit part working in two groundbreaking efforts. One was the Human Genome Project, which completed the first map of human DNA in 2003. The other was on ribozymes, RNA molecules with interesting abilities; a UC Berkeley professor, Thomas Cech, shared in a Nobel Prize for this work.

"It had the possibility to be used as an anti-viral therapeutic, which is particularly relevant today," Gutman said.

Patent attorneys sometimes visited the lab. Gutman said he grew increasingly interested in their work and eventually decided to become one himself.

These days, he's the chair of Proskauer Rose's LLP's Global Life Sciences Patent Practice, among other hats he wears. He's hardly alone on the team having a science background, something he said is useful in multiple aspects of the job.

"You have to use your scientific background in different ways with different audiences," Gutman said. "It's one thing to leverage your background when for example, you're taking a deposition of a scientist. It's another thing to engage a jury or judge on a scientific issue where you really have to work to simplify the issues."

Gutman said he's proud of his work on behalf of Amgen Inc. after it was sued by Genentech Inc. The case involved complex biosimilar cancer drugs. It fell under the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act, a 2009 federal law, and was complicated even by the standards of this rarified area of law.

Gutman and his team were able to get Genentech suit thrown out, in part using data obtained via an information sharing provision in the law, allowing Amgen's drug to move forward.

In July, Gutman and a team of attorneys persuaded U.S. District Judge Colm F. Connolly of the District of Delaware to deny Genentech' s emergency motion to prohibit commercial marketing and for a temporary restraining order against Amgen. Genentech Inc. et al. v. Immunex Rhode Island Corp. et al., 19-CV00602 (D. of Delaware, filed March 29, 2019).

"What so exciting about these biosimilar cases is that the strategies and the cases and the law are relatively new," Gutman said. "You can be creative."

-- Malcolm Maclachlan