Ropes & Gray has agreed to pay an undisclosed sum of cash to settle a long-running malpractice suit filed against the firm by former client Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which had accused Ropes of, among other things, undermining a patent it was hired to prosecute by plagiarizing another inventor’s application.
CSHL, which announced the settlement in a press release issued Monday, originally sued Ropes in the Eastern District of New York in February 2010 (NYLJ, March 25, 2010). The laboratory claimed in its complaint that it had been deprived of millions of dollars in potential licensing and royalty revenue as a result of delays in the issuance of a patent originally prosecuted by former Ropes partner Matthew Vincent.
