Can a court decision about an Alzheimer’s disease patent owned by an important U.S. biopharma company be virtually ignored because it is too long? The answer is yes, attorneys told me.  

On June 25, the UK High Court of Justice ruled that Eli Lilly had infringed a patent for an Alzheimer’s disease treatment owned by a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson but that the patent is invalid for insufficient disclosures—similar to lack of written description and enablement under U.S. patent law.  Two weeks earlier, the European Patent Office also found the J&J patent invalid.  Both decisions likely will be appealed, but, given the all-too-understandable push to find treatments and hopefully a cure for this terrible disease that is affecting so many families, including my own, the rulings would seem to be of great interest.  

I wrote an article on the UK judgment that was published in Bloomberg BNA’s Life Science Law & Industry Report and Medical Research Law & Policy Report. In researching the article, I noticed that it received some but not a lot of press coverage in the United States and surprisingly little in Europe.  

The UK judgment, written by Judge Richard Arnold, is 90-pages long. The first 60 present a detailed description of how Alzheimer’s disease attacks the brain and contain fascinating color charts and tables. The judgment is presented in the style for British court decisions, which is in numbered paragraphs. For this ruling there are 353 paragraphs.  

I talked to a number of European attorneys and asked why the UK ruling had not received much attention in newspapers and legal publications. They were not surprised. “The ruling is just too damn long,”  four different attorneys told me, in just those words.  

U.S. rulings can run long too, of course. This one from the UK may be worth a look.