Securing appellate victory for pharmaceutical manufacturer in $78.4 million case brought by state of Alabama.

The Alabama Supreme Court overturned a $78.4 million jury verdict in favor of the state of Alabama and rendered judgment in favor of our client, a leading pharmaceutical manufacturer.  Lightfoot attorneys handled the appeal for the client. The case involved claims by the Alabama Medicaid Agency that it had overpaid for generic drugs as a result of artificially inflated prices published by our client.  The court ruled in an 8-1 opinion that the state neither actually nor reasonably relied on the published prices as representing the amounts actually paid by pharmacies for drugs.  Rather, the court ruled that the agency's reimbursement formulas were based on policy choices by the agency with an awareness of what the published prices actually represented.  This awareness defeated the state's fraud claim as a matter of law.  This opinion followed a similar opinion in 2009 involving brand pharmaceuticals in which Lightfoot had represented another manufacturer.