Recent hiring trends in the legal industry may be an overall indicator of improved bio-pharmaceutical business climate.
In the early 2000′s then standalone bio-pharmaceutical company Millennium (now a subsidiary of Takeda Pharmaceuticals) announced to the world they were no longer a discovery company, but were a development company. That statement proved prophetic as the biopharmaceutical industry experienced a substantial retrenchment. Following Millennium’s proclamation, we saw numerous companies shelve early pipeline products in order to focus only on the most promising compounds in an attempt at commercialization.
We have experienced another retrenchment over the past several years as companies evaluated and overhauled their portfolios, working aggressively to outlicense and divest of nonperforming assets.
As a further sign of the times, private practice has experienced substantial portions of their business derived as a result of transactions which have included Mergers and Acquisitions, Debt procurement and refinancing, etc, while patent preparation and prosecution practices went begging.
Fast-forwarding to today, there is a ground-swell that is starting and our canaries are the Patent group of the various law practices. They are starting to get busy again drafting and prosecuting new patents. What does this mean for business in general? It is an early indicator that business is moving again. If a pharmaceutical company isn’t doing discovery, they don’t need to file a patent. If a tech company isn’t developing next gen products, they don’t need an opinion on patent validity or Freedom-to-Operate.
What will this mean in the long term, we should know the significance of the recovery soon after it is over. But it also is a promising indicator of future career opportunities across broad swaths of the economy including tech and bio-pharmaceutical industries.
