Daralyn J. Durie 

“The big news is I’m at MoFo,” Daralyn Durie, the highly regarded patent litigator, said. As of Jan. 1, Durie Tangri, the boutique she and her partners formed 14 years before, formally joined Morrison Foerster.

“It’s been great,” she said. “They have really welcomed us with open arms. … And we now have a lot of cases where there are teams that are some former Durie Tangri lawyers, some MoFo lawyers.”

One is a case involving some patents she had litigated several years ago. “And there were MoFo lawyers who knew the client, so it was an example of a nice synergy around this,” she said.

The combined team is defending a pharmaceutical company against claims it infringed two patents dealing with microfluidics and droplet-formation technology. Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. v. GigaGen, Inc., 3:22-cv-07205 (N.D. Ga., filed Nov. 16, 2022).

A principal reason Durie and her partners wanted to make the move was that their boutique was attracting larger and more complicated cases. “We felt like given the kinds of cases we were starting to get and the opportunities that our lawyers wanted to have, we were either going to have to massively scale up ourselves… or we could go to a larger firm that already had those sorts of resources,” she said. “And it didn’t seem to make sense to us to try to grow that much.”

Before the merger, her firm was already representing a drug company in a dispute about narcolepsy medications. Both companies use pharmaceutical-grade versions of the date-rape drug GBH but in different formulations and with different dosing requirements. In November, Durie won an injunction ordering Jazz Pharmaceuticals to remove its related patent from the Federal Drug Administration’s Orange Book. The Federal Circuit upheld that ruling in February, which, she said, freed the FDA to approve her client’s medicine. Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Inc. v. Avadel CNS Pharmaceuticals, LLC, 2023-1186 (Fed. Cir., dec’d Feb. 24, 2023).

Her client has now sued Jazz for antitrust violations. There is also litigation over trade secrets, regulatory issues and further activity at the FDA. MoFo has experts in all those areas. “It’s a massive case. … It’s got a lot of tentacles,” she said. “Having that sort of breadth and scale of resources has just been fantastic.”

Durie has had to drop a couple of high-profile matters because of new conflicts. As court-appointed lead counsel for HIV drug purchasers late last year, she defeated a summary judgment motion brought by Gilead and its partners and kept her plaintiffs’ proposed antitrust class action alive. Staley v. Gilead Sciences, Inc., 3:19-cv-02573 (N.D. Cal., filed May 14, 2019).

She also had to drop out of the pro bono team suing Oracle under the Equal Pay Act on behalf of about 3,000 women. Jewett v. Oracle America, Inc., 17CIV2669 (San Mateo Super. Ct., filed June 16, 2017).

“I’m sad. But that’s life,” she said about quitting the cases. “I’m fine.”

— Don DeBenedictis