With: Andrew Berdon, Joe Paunovich
Quinn Emanuel Partners
Host: John B. Quinn
Founder and chairman, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan
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Episode transcript:
Note: This transcript is generated from a recorded conversation and may contain errors or omissions. It has been edited for clarity but may not fully capture the original intent or context. For accurate interpretation, please refer to the original audio.
JOHN QUINN: This is John Quinn, and this is Law disrupted. And today we’re going to be talking about an earn out dispute, an earn out, E-A-R-N, I don’t know, maybe there’s the hyphen out, O-U-T, which we see very often in the M&A world, where parties can’t get together on values, or for whatever reason, they decide to kick the can down the road, and they decide that, well, let’s see how it goes. And if we achieve certain milestones, if we do this, or if we do that, then the payments will be, they’re established bogeys as to how the earnings will be shared and the like.
This is increasingly common in the M&A world. It’s an area that’s, it’s a structure that’s very ripe for disputes. Lots of disputes about, a lot of times, the buyer has to use reasonable best efforts.
There’s a dispute, we’re going to be talking about that today. The buyer has to use reasonable best efforts and there’s disputes about that. There’s also disputes arise from the fact where the situation where the business is incorporated into the business, the legacy business, and how do you untangle that and decide what the results were for the acquired business?
How do you measure things? Is it enough just to say, we’re going to use gap? We have seen all those types of disputes in earnouts in the M&A world.
Today, we’re going to be talking about the application of earnouts to the pharma world, the drug development world, where I think they’re actually fairly common. We’re going to be talking to two of my partners, Andy Berdon, who practices in the pharma IP area, among other things, who’s a partner in our New York office, and Joe Paunovich, who’s a partner in, I guess, our Salt Lake City office. Is that where you’re still hanging out, Joe?
JOE PAUNOVICH: It is, although I find myself in lots of different offices. So Salt Lake’s the first one.
JOHN QUINN: Yeah. So, and this is a case, as I said, that involves an earn-out dispute regarding a drug. And what happened here is there’s a these gentlemen achieved a major Delaware Chancery Court decision that awarded our clients more than $300 million in a pharma earn-out dispute.
When Alexion, now the rare disease division of AstraZeneca, bought the biotech startup Syntimmune for $400 million up front, plus up to $800 million in contingent milestone payments, they were betting on a drug, Alexion 1830, which was an extremely promising drug targeting rare autoimmune diseases. After the acquisition, however, Alexion, the buyer, quickly, we believed in the court, I think was we’re going to hear was persuaded, deprioritized and ultimately terminated the development program without paying a single milestone. It’s a terrible thing.
My partners, Andy and Joe, caught them and remedied that. The former Sydney immune shareholders who we represented, cried foul here and what followed was a fascinating case involving really complex pharmaceutical development timelines and clinical trial data. Findings that Alexion breached its obligation to use commercially reasonable efforts to develop the drug and ultimately, I guess, a massive damages award that will reverberate, we would say, for years to come in the pharmaceutical industry.
So this is the legal team today that represented the shareholders in this landmark decision and achieve this $300 million result. So congratulations, Andy and Joe. Let me begin with you, Andy, and ask you if you could just start by giving our audience the big picture here.
Walk us through, who are the key players in the dispute? What was this drug candidate? What diseases was it designed to treat?”
Why was it potentially so valuable that the earn out payments, I guess, could have reached up to $800 million? That’s a lot to cover. But why don’t you start somewhere and start talking about that, and I’ll paint you with some questions.
ANDY BERDON: Thanks very much, John. I appreciate the chance to talk to you about the case. Really, this starts out with an idea.
And the idea was that you could create a humanized mouse antibody that would target the production of IgG in the body. And IgG, when it’s produced to excess or in the wrong way, creates a host of autoimmune diseases. And they include myosinia gravis and skin condition called penthegous.
It causes eye problems. And so you have a host of health problems that can come when you have unhealthy levels of IgG. And researchers at Harvard came up with an approach and they found funding with a biotech venture capital firm that basically created a company around this idea.
And they carried it from the earliest stage of idea, off into turning it into a drug, turning it into a drug that could be safely tested on humans. And they ended up getting what they considered to be very solid evidence that the drug was both safe and effective in lowering IgG levels to a point where it was generally accepted. You would be able to see benefit, therapeutic benefit, and reduction in diseases.
Now, I do want to point out that we do have these wonderful verdicts, but they are still subject to appeal. And so the things we’re talking about today were found by the court to be true. But our verdict is not necessarily going to stay intact through the appeal process, although we certainly expect that we will.
But I just wanted to caveat that.
JOHN QUINN: So this is work that was done at the university, Andy?
ANDY BERDON: The original work was done by Dr. Rick Blumberg in his lab at Harvard and then his brother, Dr. Lawrence Blumberg. And he put together a small amount of angel investment where they were then able to hire outside contractors to come in and start doing the chemistry, essentially, in this case, the biology that could figure out how to take this idea. And as I said, it’s a humanized mouse antibody that became the building blocks for Alexion 1830.
JOHN QUINN: And did they form Synimmune, the corporation that I referred to?
ANDY BERDON: They did. What happened was, they met up with a venture capitalist who worked for a venture capital firm called Appletree Partners. Now it’s called ATP.
His name is Dr. Sam Hall and Dr. Hall was interested in the area. He was interested in autoimmune diseases.
And his job was to go out and find early-stage biotech ideas and ATP, Appletree. They’re in the business of forming new companies around these new ideas and taking them forward to the point where they have enough clinical information that they call proof of concept. So that they can then realize value.
And whether that value is an IPO, selling to a larger private equity firm, or doing a strategic transaction with a larger biotech, that’s the important thing is they carry it forward to the point where they can realize value. And in this case, they invested more than $75 million in Syntimmune, and we’re at a point where they had this clinical data and were ready essentially either to take the company public or to syndicate with other private investors. What happened was fortuitously, Alexion heard about it and saw some of the publications that had been written.
And so Alexion approached Syntimmune to talk about buying the whole company. And that’s how this all started.
JOHN QUINN: And so they negotiated and struck a deal, as I understand it. And Joe, could you tell us in broad outlines, what were the terms of that deal? What was Alexion going to pay for Syntimmune and the rights to this Alexion 1830 drug that was under development?
JOE PAUNOVICH: Yeah, thanks, John. So in the total, the total consideration was going to be up to potentially 1.2 billion. And that would be basically in two buckets.
The first would be a $400 million upfront payment. And then potential earn out payments that would total up to 800 million, divided into eight developmental milestones. And those milestones are tied to different aspects of the development of the Alexion 1830 drug, some of which were, actually most of which were pre-commercialization, pre-approval.
So these are clinical trial milestones.
JOHN QUINN: Can you flesh those out for us? Yeah, please give us an idea of what those look like.
JOE PAUNOVICH: Yeah. So for example, for those that are in the know in the pharmaceutical space, a drug goes through typically three phases of clinical trial development. There are some nuances to that, but three phases of a phase one, phase two, and phase three.
And there are, there can be significant fallout rates for drug candidates for, I think the statistic is something like only 5% of drugs that start at a phase one eventually make it out to FDA approval, for example. And so at the very earliest stage, phase one, this is where you are simply using the drug in a healthy patient, so not a diseased patient, to see whether or not there are any safety signals or things of that nature. And then in later phases, you would be looking at the treatment of a diseased patient and figuring out things like the dosage amount or the frequency, things of that nature.
And so that $800 million in potential development milestones were tied to various stops along the way of clinical development, some of which were as simple or as early as just completing a phase one clinical trial. And so where this case was somewhat distinct from other pharma earn out cases, where often some of many of those development milestones might be tied only to the very later stages FDA approval or the amount that a drug earns in the first several years. Most of the developmental milestones in this case were tied to that pre approval events like completing various clinical stage events.
JOHN QUINN: I mean, how many total milestones were there?
JOE PAUNOVICH: Yeah, there were eight total milestones. And I think Andy may need to be my back step on this, but I think two or only two or three of them were tied to post approval performance in the marketplace. All of the balance were for pre-approval events like the completion of clinical trials.
JOHN QUINN: Now, I said in my lead in that this type of structure was common in drug development. And, you know, check me on that. Is that right?
I know I’ve been involved in cases involving drug development, and they have this sort of milestone structure.
ANDY BERDON: That’s exactly right.
JOHN QUINN: And, you know, like in all, there’s a tension here, as in all earn-out structures, somebody’s basically selling a business here. You’re selling the rights to a molecule, to somebody else who’s then under going to undertake to do something. And the seller gives up control.
But they’re kind of at the mercy of the buyer and what the buyer does. And usually that’s addressed by language along the lines of the buyer will use reasonable best efforts, or best efforts or variations or come hell or high water. They shall do this and they shall do that.
I mean, what was the structure here? What was the obligation that the buyer undertook in this contract?
JOE PAUNOVICH: Sure. And I’ll field this one. There are two types in the pharmaceutical world. There are two types of commercially reasonable efforts clauses that we look at.
There are some that are considered inward focusing. And the inward focusing ones say, I, the buyer, will give this drug the same attention that I would give a homegrown drug, you know, in terms of efforts and resources. And as long as the drugs were of similar potential, I won’t treat this any worse.
There are then outwardly focused provisions. And what they say is, I agree to use the same efforts as a competitor would use in trying to bring a similar drug to the market. And so what we had was an outwardly focused provision where Alexion said that they would undertake to use the same efforts as a similarly situated biotech would to pursue a similarly situated drug.
And that ended up being extremely important because Alexion had a series of internal decisions where they were rationalizing their portfolio and picking and choosing among the programs that they either did or didn’t want to pursue. And what we litigated and got the court to find is that they had bargained away the right to do that. And that they had promised to use an external reference.
And we had four external references here who were all developing drugs in the same category. And they all were showing progress that was consistent and very focused on getting their products to market while Alexion was focusing on dozens of other programs and was not paying the same sort of attention to Alexion 1830.
JOHN QUINN: That’s a really interesting and sounds like an important point. They undertook to use efforts that would be as measured by what would be acceptable or standard or reasonable in the industry and not just what they would do in house and picking and choosing among their own candidates, what level of effort they’re going to devote to this one as opposed to others. And what I’m hearing is that they contractually committed to the former, but the evidence suggested that they were really what they were really doing is something like the ladder.
JOE PAUNOVICH: Well, that’s exactly right. They took absolutely no steps to monitor the progress of other companies and then to adjust their own activities to match those external forces. They were entirely inwardly focused and at trial we were able to establish that there was nobody assigned to check to see if they were complying with this contract.
JOHN QUINN: How does this happen? Did the evidence suggest to you? I know when I litigate cases, I sort of, you know, you learn a set of facts, you meet the witnesses, you become a bit of a historian and you’re able to often put together what happens here.
And a lot sometimes it’s just personalities like, I don’t know, I’ve had the experience and maybe you have as well where you realize, hey, if this person hadn’t been like that and this person hadn’t been like that, you know, this all never would have happened. You can kind of see how it went down. What happened here from your perspective?
ANDY BERDON: Well, Joe, I’ll jump in on this one. Please join me. There are two things that happen, John, and two things that generally happen because I’ve been in the industry a long time and you see this, you have a point in time where there’s a great deal of enthusiasm for a project and whether it’s because of changes in people or changes in strategic focus, when you go 6, 12, 18 months down the road, either the decision-makers have changed or corporate priorities have changed, and so they’re stuck with a deal that they no longer are really happy about.
Joe, you can pick up and talk about what we saw in the evidence.
JOE PAUNOVICH: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I think what’s interesting to what Andy just said is both of those things happened in this particular case. So Alexion, before it was acquired by AstraZeneca, had a particular initiative to fill their pipeline with additional candidate drugs.
And they had various corporate initiatives and different management folks who were in charge of these programs, some of which changed during the course, immediate aftermath, that’s 12 to 18 months or so after this particular acquisition. And it’s also a unique time period. We’re talking about this deal overlapping the start of COVID and going all the way through COVID.
And so what we saw ultimately through the evidence is that there, as Andy had mentioned, I think there was initial enthusiasm about this particular drug candidate and this particular space, which fast forward is looking like it will be one of the largest blockbuster areas for drug development that anyone has seen in the last several decades. But when COVID hit and people are tightening their belt, management have to go back and reconsider decisions. There was ultimately a decision that was made internally at Alexion to focus on their corporate initiative of launching at least 10 drugs by 2023.
In that crucible of COVID where money was tight and people didn’t know what the future looked like, that forced them, as we saw in the evidence, to make decisions about what to prioritize over other products. The parallel to all of this was a competing interest that Alexion, which was not small but bigger than Syntimmune, but still small by comparison to quote Big Pharma, had a very strong interest in M&A activity and wanting to be acquired by Big Pharma, which they ultimately were in the summer of 2021, when the deal was consummated by AstraZeneca. And so, you see this, we saw this focus and really relentlessly pursued the truth of what the evidence told us, which was that they deprioritized 1830.
And then in both in the lead-up and ultimate acquisition by AstraZeneca, there was a desire to prioritize those products that they felt were going to make the company the most attractive that it could. And unfortunately, even though we believed something very differently, that led to 1830 being deprioritized and eventually the management at AstraZeneca making a decision to terminate it.
JOHN QUINN: You know, I was curious about how these decisions that end up biting companies in the ass come about. Was there any evidence in the discovery, was there any indication that they realized, hey, there’s a potential problem here? Or were there a lot of privileged documents that you couldn’t, that lawyers were involved in, you didn’t get to see that kind of material?
I mean, were there sort of some acknowledgement in the evidence that they were running a risk here?
JOE PAUNOVICH: I think we can probably both address this, but I’ll jump in first if that’s okay, Andy. Absolutely, is the short answer, and that’s a very pointed, prophetic question because we saw evidence of this all over their privilege log and suggestions. Of course, privilege log isn’t evidence, and so we were forced to, there were lots of privilege disputes and having to draw out inferences from the circumstantial evidence.
But even in the non-privilege documents, we saw and what we believed and argued to the court was that a decision was made in connection with the acquisition by AstraZeneca to ultimately terminate this program. But that was the motivation, this acquisition, and the court ultimately agreed with us on that. That required assembling a lot of different puzzle pieces from different witnesses, getting deposition testimony, as well as really damning admissions at trial about when they had made this particular set of decisions.
Although, there was no proverbial smoking gun to that, we felt and made a very persuasive case that the court agreed with, that it didn’t have anything to do with the science. It didn’t have to do with the potential value proposition of this drug, but rather, it was a business decision.
JOHN QUINN: Just so everybody is clear to everyone, the company that was established by the academic people who discovered this opportunity was called Syntimmune, and Syntimmune was the whole Syntimmune itself sold or just this molecule?
JOE PAUNOVICH: The whole company.
JOHN QUINN: The whole company was sold to Axion, and then Axion is acquired by one of the big pharma companies, AstraZeneca.
JOE PAUNOVICH: Exactly.
JOHN QUINN: What you’re telling us is that there was a lot of evidence in connection with that AstraZeneca acquisition, that there was a real change in direction which caused them to just basically default or abandon or not perform their obligations under this earn out provision. I mean, did they, did you argue about reasonable best efforts? Was there defense?
Hey, we exercise reasonable best efforts. We really did. But, you know, it’s just the game wasn’t worth the candle.
We did what was reasonable, but we stopped because it wasn’t worth it. Was that essentially their defense?
JOE PAUNOVICH: It was, John. And really what they said was that this drug was not safe. And they created a story that attempted to show that the drug’s safety profile, together with it not being a potential first mover in the market, just made it impossible for them to continue to invest in it.
And that’s where the case really came together for us and fell apart for them. Because we dug in hard on the science of the safety of this drug. And it required a great deal of digging in that and a great deal of persuasion.
But what it all came down to is that there was a dichotomy. There was what they were telling the FDA in regulatory filings that are done under oath. And with penalties essentially of the equivalent of perjury versus the story that they were telling on the stand.
Even though that was under penalty of perjury, the difference between those two things was stark. And one of the things that I’ve learned is that number one, mid-management and the people who run drug development don’t lie to their bosses about the benefits and risks of drugs that are under development. Those people are serious scientists and they are the ones who are going to report the facts up the chain and they report the facts to the FDA.
It’s the C-suite where mischief occurs. And I can I can tell you that in closing, when opposing counsel got up, they said, in essence, your honor, Mr. Burton is acting as if none of the testimony that happened in this case actually went into the record. And we might as well never have had a trial.
All Mr. Burton is looking at is documents. And on rebuttal, I got up and I said, I couldn’t agree more. I’m looking at documents that were submitted by good, responsible people to the FDA, intending that the FDA rely on it.
And what did those documents say? The documents said that there were no safety problems with this drug and that it did a good job at reducing IGG. And everything else we’ve heard has been put together to try and excuse this failure to use commercially reasonable efforts.
And that ultimately was the argument, I think, that won the day.
JOHN QUINN: Right. Well, I mean, you can see why they would go to safety. I mean, if they can raise an issue about safety, that’s potential showstopper, right?
JOE PAUNOVICH: Exactly.
JOHN QUINN: But you were able to drill down on the science and show that there really wasn’t reality to that. How about the other argument, that the loss of first mover advantage, that there were other drugs? In the right circumstance, that could be a commercially reasonable reason for not proceeding.
JOE PAUNOVICH: Absolutely, John. And that’s one of the things we looked at, and one of the benefits of having four other companies out there, all of them developing anti-FCRN products, the same category of products, none of them stopped. And the answer is, they were making their investments in clinical trials for different indications, different diseases.
And the evidence that they provided for being effective against myasemia gravis, for example, didn’t mean that there wasn’t still a market there for treatment of a serious eye disorder. And what Alexion and AstraZeneca’s internal development people had come up with was an internal program suggesting that they essentially go around the competition, focus on some of the slightly less prominent indications, but it still had the prospect of being a multi-billion dollar drug. And so what the court ultimately found was that a similarly situated company would not have abandoned this drug just because it lacked first mover advantage.
ANDY BERDON: If I can just highlight a point on that too, you know, there’s a cliché in the pharma industry that gets banished about but is rarely true, this concept of a pipeline in a product. But this particular drug and other drugs like it really do represent that. And that’s why it’s such a burgeoning and incredibly valuable area for lots of different drug companies to look into.
Because all of these rare autoimmune diseases are caused or triggered by this condition relating to IgG. It’s either IgG-mediated. And so if you’re able to develop a drug which has the ability to lower those IgG levels, you can treat not just one but possibly as many as a dozen or more autoimmune diseases that are, by the way, absolutely terrible diseases that, you know, prior to these drugs like this, you know, coming onto the market, which is very recently, you know, left people with, you know, a really miserable life to live.
JOHN QUINN: Well, you’ve got $300 million with constant attorney’s fees as well?
ANDY BERDON: There is a claim now under the M&A agreement for fees because there’s an indemnification provision there. And so that’s out there. But pre and post judgment interest at this point is very, very significant.
JOHN QUINN: All right. So $300 million. That’s not chicken feed.
That’s congratulations, guys. That’s a good, good number. But I think I heard you say that the total amount that the car clients would have gotten or could have gotten if all the different hurdles had been cleared was more like $800 million.
I mean, if they didn’t use reasonable best efforts, why wasn’t the award here to the max, to $800 million rather than $300 million?
ANDY BERDON: That’s a great question, John. And I’ll start and Joe can pick up where I leave off. This was an issue that really the court put a tremendous amount of time and effort into addressing.
Because on the one hand, she recognized that by killing the project when they did, we were essentially deprived, shots on goal, of the seven additional milestones. The litigation involved the finding that Alexion had actually met the first milestone, and that was 130 million. So we put that on the scoreboard first.
Then the question was, these subsequent milestones, which were initiation of what we call a pivotal clinical trial in one indication or a second indication, FDA approval in a first indication or a second indication, approval in the EU for a first indication and a second indication, and then clearing of a initial earnings milestone, that there was at least a non-zero chance that we had, you know, the stuff to hit these milestones. But she wanted to try and understand better the value of each of those chances. She found expressly that to give us all $800 million would have been a windfall because we really weren’t deprived of 100% of all of those things as a result of their quitting the project.
And so she undertook an extensive probabilities analysis using some of the data that the parties had provided, but also coming up with some probabilities analysis of her own to essentially risk weight each of these milestones. And so there were one was more than 60% and then others were down around 7 or 8%. And that combined came up with the 181 million that she awarded.
JOE PAUNOVICH: And so it really came down to the court being very mindful of the fact that they didn’t want to give the selling shareholders of Syntimmune a windfall, but nor did they want to reward Alexion for having given up on this project and deprived us of all those shots on goal.
That’s really kind of interesting. I mean, so one way of looking at this is if they defaulted on milestone one, and so never even reached any of the milestones, you should get paid for all of them. That’s one way of looking at that.
I mean, we’re the victims here, but it sounds like what she did is she said, well, that’s not fair because we have to take into account whether in fact you would have been able to achieve those milestones, have gotten those approvals, have gotten those results.
ANDY BERDON: You can negotiate an acceleration clause where finding a material breach on one milestone triggers all the subsequent milestones. Right. That’s something you can negotiate through.
JOHN QUINN: All right. Well, anything, this is interesting. And there’s obviously some intellectual questions.
There’s more to it than initially meets the eye here. Are there any other particular issues about this case that you thought were interesting, or obstacles you had to overcome, or insights that you think would be interesting to share with our audience?
ANDY BERDON: Well, sure. I think one of the challenges was presenting data on the probabilities. One of the problems in the industry is that information about the probabilities of any particular drug or drug category, making it through the clinic, are commercially sold and not readily available.
And they are something of a black box. We retained an expert who had spent his career coming up with methodology to assemble publicly available information and make information on these outcomes available for the academic community, sort of like an open source. The court was not comfortable with either the blanket black box approach that the other side favored or the open source approach.
And so what they did was, the court did was she looked for specific instances where Alexion on its own internal forecasts assigned probabilities. And she got to a point where it was very clear that they had arbitrarily reduced the likelihood of success as part of the decision to kill the drug. But she preferred to make reference to the internal decision making metrics that Alexion used.
So she didn’t accept either of the expert reports, basically, offered by Alexion or the selling shareholders of Syntimmune on those experts’ views of the likelihood of success.
JOHN QUINN: So what’s going to happen to this drug now?
ANDY BERDON: Unfortunately, the drug is dead. There are four companies that are out there. One of them is a company, it’s a one-drug company.
And it’s now got a multi-billion-dollar enterprise value based on their anti-FCRN drug. So the patients are being served in the category, but the selling shareholders of Syntimmune, and in particular, Dr. Blumberg at Harvard, saw one of his life’s goals, one of his life’s work. Sold to a big company that put it on the shelf.
And that’s very unfortunate for him, because he thought that he had come up with a drug that was better. It was more effective. You know, it was less potentially toxic than the others in the category.
JOHN QUINN: Does this happen very often in the industry? You heard the term sometimes catch and kill, you know? Do you see this phenomenon that you described, that we saw in this case?
Has that happened very often?
JOE PAUNOVICH: So, I mean, we looked at that and considered whether or not this might be a catch or kill type case. I mean, even though the fact pattern has some parallels to that, we genuinely don’t or didn’t believe that, ultimately didn’t come to believe that it was a catch and kill scenario where the original acquisition was done strictly or solely to mothball this particular development plan. The catch-and-kill phenomenon, though, certainly can and does happen.
And I think, you know, John, we’ve litigated some of those cases before.
JOHN QUINN: We have.
JOE PAUNOVICH: You know, here, I would just touch on one other piece. I mean, there’s a, I think, sadly, very much for Dr. Blumberg, you know, that this product, this drug will not, you know, continue through the development cycle because of all of the baggage associated with it. One of the things, though, that I think was very apparent to both Andy and I, is the importance of this commercially reasonable efforts contract provision.
You know, we, we talk a lot of it. We always, as litigators, have to litigate, you know, the deal counsel’s terms. And, you know, if this were an inwardly facing commercially reasonable efforts provision, the result of this case may have been very different.
Thankfully, we’ve been able to return, you know, real value, real concrete value. It may not be the entire $800 million in contingent milestones, but real value because of the way this provision was drafted and the unique circumstances that Andy mentioned and our digging in on what else was happening out there in the marketplace. You know, every drug has risk, whether that be safety or efficacy.
You can get bad data. In fact, it would be atypical if you don’t get some bad data along the way. But it was really important here that we had benchmarks within the industry and a provision that required Alexion to look at what other people were doing.
And they simply didn’t do that.
JOHN QUINN: Well, congratulations, gentlemen, on your $300 million result. The doctor who invented this was Dr. Birnbaum, Dr. Richard Blumberg. Dr. Richard Blumberg, I’m sure he’s disappointed that this molecule he came up with apparently is not going to be injected into patients arms, but maybe the money will swage his hard feelings a little bit once the check comes in.
ANDY BERDON: And one of the things you learn is that for guys like Rick Blumberg, it’s not about the money. This was his passion, and so the money will take care of the economics. But this was a bitter disappointment that he’s not going to get much satisfaction from.
But he’s a good guy and his career at Harvard is one that he can be very proud of.
JOHN QUINN: There’s only so much litigators can do. Even if you are Quinn Emanuel partners, Andy Berdon and Joe Paunovich. This is John Quinn, and this has been Law disrupted.
Thank you for listening to Law disrupted with me, John Quinn. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe and leave a rating and review on your chosen podcast app. To stay up to date with the latest episodes, you can sign up for e-mail alerts at our website law-disrupted.fm, or follow me on X at JBQ Law or at Quinn Emanuel.
Thank you for tuning in.
Published: Oct 28 2025
