My last Blog Post covered when lawyers behave so badly they wear out the presiding judge, this Post covers another lawyer topic that was included in the mix of the same case involving Belbuca®(buprenorphine) Buccal Film. Due to my personal professional standards, and the fact that the Court never ruled on whether the lawyer was actually behaving badly, I will just refer to him as Lawyer X though the information is public. The allegations involving Lawyer X are a bit unseemly, if in fact true.

The Two and a Half Years

As you may recall from the last Blog Post, the District Court in Delaware issued its Final Judgment in this case in January 2022. The Court of Appeals remanded part of this case back to Delaware for more analysis in February 2023. But nothing happened. The parties Biodelivery and Alvogen did not proceed in trying the remanded issues. Instead, Biodelivery asked the Court two and a half years later in July 2025 to Enforce the Judgment and also to disqualify Lawyer X along with Alvogen’s law firm.

During the two and a half years of silence, Alvogen had undertaken a strategy to rework the product and file a second ANDA with FDA. By doing so, the adverse Final Judgment would not apply to the second, and current, ANDA, creating a fresh PIV case and second chance to litigate the ANDA. This is where Lawyer X enters the story.

Regulatory Work or Litigation Matters?

Apparently, Lawyer X had done some work in the past for Alvogen on regulatory matters. That is, he helps Alvogen and presumably other generic companies in preparation and submission of ANDA’s with FDA. The law firm handling the PIV litigation (a different one than Lawyer X’s firm) hired Lawyer X to help Alvogen after the Final Judgment and Court of Appeals remand.

By itself, this is not a problem.

As part of Alvogen response to Biodelivery’s Motion to Enforce the Judgment, Alvogen attached a 25 page declaration from Lawyer X in support of its position.

The Allegations

However, the declaration was the problem along with the behavior of Lawyer X and Alvogen’s law firm. Biodelivery alleged that Lawyer X had worked with Biodelivery on the very same PIV case between 2021-2023. It claimed that Lawyer X was aware of its litigation strategy for the case during this time, and the fact that Alvogen’s law firm later hired Lawyer X to help Alvogen was never disclosed.

Furthermore, Biodelivery alleged that Lawyer X was one of the “architects” of the Alvogen strategy to rework the original ANDA and submit it as a second, separate ANDA to circumvent the Final Judgment.

As you might guess, Lawyer X was in a conflict of interest, having worked with Biodelivery and then Alvogen on the same matter. This is a big “no-no” amongst lawyers. Biodelivery claimed that Alvogen’s law firm admitted this by agreeing to strike the declaration of Lawyer X yet it continued to rely on the substance of this declaration.

But, as Biodelivery went onto argue, the bell had been rung, and you can’t undue to the conflict and its potential damage.

Conflict Settled

Luckily for Lawyer X and Alvogen’s law firm, the Delaware Court did not rule on the Motion to Disqualify them. The Judge left it for a later day, and the parties resolved the conflict on their own, agreeing to exclude Lawyer X from further work on this case.

But the events certainly raise questions such as (1) Was Alvogen’s law firm aware of the conflict when it engaged Lawyer X? (2) Did Lawyer X disclose the prior work to the law firm? (3) When did they become aware of the conflict? and (4) What steps, if any, did they take once the conflict issue was raised?