April 2018

Update: Tribal Sovereign Immunity Can’t Protect Allergan from the PTAB

Brenden Hoffman, MJLST Staffer

 

Last September, the pharmaceutical company Allergan entered an agreement with the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe where the pharmaceutical company sold its patents for the wildly successful drug Restasis to the tribe. The six patents were then licensed back to Allergan.  These moves have been widely criticized as a sham transaction. For more information about this controversy and its role in the ongoing debate over inter partes reviews (IPR’s), see my October 15, 2017 post here.

On February 23, 2018, the PTAB ruled that tribal sovereign immunity does not apply to IPR’s and denied the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe’s Motion to Terminate the challenges to the Restasis patents made by Mylan Pharmaceuticals Inc., Teva Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. and Akorn Inc.   In this decision, the PTAB dealt a serious blow to the Allergan/Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe deal, finding that tribal sovereign immunity does not apply to IPR proceedings generally and that in this specific instance, that there was no real tra


Could EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) strengthen the United States Consumer Privacy Protection Laws?

Young Choo, MJLST Staffer

 

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will replace the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC in May of 2018. Unlike the Directive, GDPR does not require each European state to enact a national statute. The GDPR would uniformly apply to countries in the European Union. European Commission proposed the GDPR to “strength and unify data protections for people in the European Union.” The regulation also addresses the export of personal data outside of the European Union. More specifically, Article 3 of GDPR says that “if you collect personal data or behavioral information from someone in an EU country, your company is subject to the requirements of the GDPR.”  Consequently, companies in United States dealing with European Union consumer information are expected to be in compliance with GDPR.

 

In light of the new regulation, the U.S. companies, either have facilities in the EU or having personal data of European, are busy to be in compliance with the GDPR. What would be generally required under the GDPR for the U.S. companies? The first step would be deciding whether GDPR applies to the company. The second step would be having a Data Protection Officer (DPO). A Data Protection Officer (DPO) is “a position within a corporation that acts as an independent advocate for the proper care and use of customer’s information.” The third step would be creating a strategy to be in compliance with the GDPR. To do so, drafting a Privacy Policy agreement in line with the GDPR is necessary. Key requirements should be provided in the privacy policy under the GDPR would be (1) “Privacy Notices”; (2) “Consent”; (3) “Data Subjects’ Rights”; (4) “Security”; (5) “Data Protection Assessment”; (6) “Breach Notification”; (7) “Service Providers”.

 

Could these U.S. companies’ movement to be in compliance with GDPR also influence the United States’ Data Protection law as well? The answer is “possibly”. California recently initiated the move toward more stringent data privacy laws. “The California Consumer Personal Information Disclosure and Sale Initiative (#17-0039) may appear on the ballot in California.” The Initiative includes the following rights for consumers:

 

Gives consumers right to learn categories of personal information that

businesses collect, sell, or disclose about them, and to whom information

is sold or disclosed. Gives consumers right to prevent businesses from

selling or disclosing their personal information. Prohibits businesses from

discriminating against consumers who exercise these rights.

Allows consumers to sue businesses for security breaches of consumers’ data, even if consumers cannot prove injury. Allows for enforcement by consumers, whistleblowers, or public agencies.

 

Another impact the movement toward stringent data protection compliance could bring is the changes of perception of “harms” in the data breach setting. United States courts have not considered “data breach” itself as a harm. They always required an additional showing of consequential harm arising out from the data breach, such as money spent on monitoring the data breach or any credit card misuses arising from the breach. On the other hand, the E.U. data protection law is strongly based on the idea that data breach itself is a harm because privacy is a fundamental human right. It is important to note how circuit courts would decide Article III on a standing issue, one of the requirements for the plaintiffs to prove is a “concrete and particularized harm”, in the data breach setting.

 


And Then AI Came For The Lawyers…?

Matt McCord, MJLST Staffer

 

Artificial intelligence’s possibility to make many roles redundant has generated no small amount of policy and legal discussion and analysis. Any number of commentators have speculated on AI’s capacity to transform the economy far more substantially than the automation boom of the last half-century; one discussion on ABC’s Q&A described the difference in today’s technology development trends as being “alinear” as opposed to predictable, like the car, a carriage with an engine, supplanting a carriage drawn by a horse.

Technological development has largely helped to streamline law practice and drive new sources of business and avenues for marketing. Yet, AI may be coming for lawyers’ jobs next. A New Zealand firm is working to develop AI augmentation for legal services. The firm, MinterEllisonRuddWatts, looks to be in the early stages of developing this system, having entered into a joint venture agreement to work on development pathways.

The firm claims that the AI would work to reduce the more mundane analytic tasks from lawyers’ workloads, such as contract analysis and document review, but would only result in the labor force having to “reduce,” not be “eliminated.” Yet, the development of law-competent AI may result in massive levels of workforce reduction and transformation: Mills & Reeve’s Paul Knight believes that the adoption will shutter many firms and vastly shrink the need for, in particular, junior lawyers.

Knight couches this prediction in sweetening language, stating that the tasks remaining for lawyers would be “more interesting,” leading to a more efficient, more fulfilled profession engaging in new specialties and roles. Adopting AI on the firm level has clear benefits for firms looking to maximize profit per employee: current-form AI, according to one study, AI is more accurate than many human attorneys in spotting contract issues, and vastly more efficient, completing a 90-minute task in 30 seconds.

Knight, like many AI promoters, claims that the profession, and society at large, should embrace AI’s role in transforming professions by transfiguring labor force requirements, believing AI’s benefits of increasing efficiency and work fulfillment by reducing human interaction with more mundane tasks. These words will likely do little to assuage the nerves of younger, prospective market entrants and attorney specializing in these “more mundane” areas, who may be wondering if AI’s development may eliminate their role from the labor force.

While AI’s mass deployment in the law is currently limited, due in part to high costs, experimental technology, and limited current applications, machine learning, especially recursive learning and adaptation, may bring this development firmly into the forefront of the field unpredictably, quickly, and possibly in the very near future.