CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
Nader Rips Conyers for WilmerHale Bailout Bill
25 Corporate Crime Reporter 36, September 11, 2011
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader last week ripped Congressman John Conyers (D-Michigan) for his role in getting passed special interest legislation that would retroactively save corporate law firm WilmerHale more than $200 million.
“You got an amendment passed into law,” Nader wrote to Conyers in a letter dated September 9, 2011. “It wasn’t a raise in the stagnant minimum wage or some tougher measures on corporate crime or needed revisions to the Patriot Act or curbing official illegality by the Executive Branch.”
“No, it was to save a drug company and its law firm a great deal of money and allow higher prices for patients which included neutering the potential malpractice liability of the law firm – $214 million worth – retroactively of course,” Nader wrote. “This bailout is in an overall anti-small business, anti-small inventor, patent bill.”
President Obama is expected to sign the bill into law this week.
The Senate passed the bill last week, and the House passed it in June.
The bill is a patent system overhaul bill, with a special provision that would most likely let WilmerHale off the hook on a $214 million malpractice judgment.
The story spans more than a decade.
WilmerHale was handling a patent filing for a drug company – the Parsippany, New Jersey based Medicines Company.
The law firm missed the filing deadline by a day, causing the patent to be denied by the Patent and Trademark Office.
The company sued the law firm for malpractice.
WilmerHale settled the malpractice case by agreeing to pay $18 million, plus another $214 million in damages if a generic competitor for one of its drugs in question came on line before June 2015.
The bill – soon to become law – would retroactively grant the company the patent it was seeking by changing Patent Office rules on late filings.
The bill was sponsored by Conyers in the House and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) in the Senate.
The bill was actively opposed by Senators Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) and Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma).
Nader is siding with Sessions and Coburn and the Wall Street Journal editorial board.
In a last ditch but failed attempt to stop the legislation from passing the Senate, Coburn and Session wrote a letter to their Senate colleagues.
“The key question is whether we will vote to bail out a law firm that made a mistake and now wants consumers and taxpayers to pay the freight for that error,” they wrote.
The answer from the Senate last week – yes.
The Senate voted to reject an amendment introduced by Sessions to delete the WilmerHale bailout provision from the bill.
The Wall Street Journal also weighed in against the bailout.
“There are few things as unbecoming as a law firm and drug company seeking special favors from Congress that would weaken patent law for their own self interest,” the Wall Street Journal editorialized last week. “Asking Congress to break the rules as a special favor corrupts the law.”
“Amazing who was on the right side here,” Nader wrote to Conyers. “Lamar Smith, Jeff Sessions, Tom Coburn. They argued against interfering with the litigation.”
“This is the same half of WilmerHale – that is, the merged Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering – that stood with the auto giants in 1966 in weakening the auto safety legislation. WCP lobbied successfully to delete the criminal penalty – properly defended by Tip O’Neill – provision from the bill for willful and knowing violation of safety standards.”
“So this is where we are with leading progressives in the Congress,” Nader wrote. “No authentic push for Obama’s 2008 promise to raise the federal minimum wage to $9.50. No push for a comprehensive corporate criminal law code in the midst of a corporate crime wave. And the most minimum attention to the runaway outlaw presidency that, with Congressional complicity, has turned Congress for a decade into an inkblot during these endless, costly unilateral wars and remote interventions.”
“Promises, nice words, meetings, but nothing like the activated, driven toughness of those who call themselves Tea Partiers, where you work.”
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