Nanotechnology

The GS Intellectual Property team blends its members’ real-world work in scientific and high-tech disciplines with exceptional business acumen and deep experience handling patents, trade secrets, copyrights, trademarks, and other IP matters. The result is a tech-savvy and efficient team dedicated to helping clients develop practical business strategies that maximize the return on their investments and innovations. With extensive experience helping inventors and companies obtain patent protection around the world, as well as litigating and trying complex patent, trademark, copyright, and commercial cases, we are well positioned to advise clients working at the intersection of nanotechnology and numerous industries.

Goldberg Segalla’s Life Sciences practice encompasses the traditional spheres of biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices. As a team of attorneys equipped with advanced degrees across the spectrum of biology, chemistry, and biomedical and chemical engineering — as well as real-world experience working in the high-tech and health sciences sectors — we understand that drug discovery often involves biotechnological tools, that diagnostics combine materials with assay systems, and that medical devices often carry drug or biological activities.

And we know that nanotechnology can and will disrupt and influence all of the above.

We have the technical and legal experience to assist clients developing, working with, or monetizing nanotechnologies at any stage — from offering comprehensive regulatory compliance counsel to handling product liability lawsuits or Hatch-Waxman litigation, launching new products, providing risk management analysis, defending product labeling claims, and navigating enforcement actions and crises.

Nanotechnology and the spreading use of nanomaterials present the possibility of claims and investigations for environmental contamination and cleanups.

Goldberg Segalla’s Environmental practice encompasses the full spectrum of federal, state, and local environmental laws and regulations and their impact on real estate, business and lending transactions, and business operations. With extensive experience advising on emerging environmental risk and unregulated contaminants, our team can assist clients with nanotechnology-related matters including:

• Cost Recovery — We assist clients in analyzing their potential cleanup liability and examine how that liability might be spread among multiple sources, including insurance carriers, prior owners and/or operators, and other stakeholders who may have a relationship to the environmental conditions at issue. We also assist clients in evaluating the availability of remedial funding through loan and grant programs, including those that may be subsidized by government entities.
• Environmental Crisis Management — Goldberg Segalla’s team of environmental lawyers apply years of experience in compliance counseling and risk mitigation to help our clients anticipate, avoid, and prepare for environmental crises. We assist in assessing crisis risks in corporate planning sessions; develop and advise on contingency plans and response measures; act as outside counsel during mock company simulations and drills; and help companies develop training materials, emergency action plans, and media strategies.
• Environmental Litigation — With extensive experience handling complex environmental cases in federal, state and administrative courts across our national footprint, our environmental attorneys handle all phases of civil litigation, enforcement and penalty actions, and administrative proceedings on environmental issues.
• Environmental Insurance — Our environmental attorneys have advised and litigated on behalf of our clients in the environmental insurance coverage area as part and parcel of assisting clients in managing their environmental liabilities. We routinely advise clients on procuring “new” environmental insurance policies to address known and unknown risks. We have experience negotiating the terms of these environmental policies to craft solutions to specific problems, which can allow for disputes to be settled and transactions to occur.

Goldberg Segalla is widely renowned for its litigation and trial capabilities, with deep bench strength throughout the firm’s entire national footprint. Our attorneys are experienced in litigating, trying, and negotiating favorable settlements across the full spectrum of personal injury litigation.

Goldberg Segalla’s toxic tort and personal injury litigators represent a diverse array of over 100 prominent clients in thousands of cases pending around the country. Flexible, collaborative, and efficient, our attorneys are equally equipped to serve as local, regional, or national counsel in complex, high-value claims.

One of many things that distinguish Goldberg Segalla’s litigators and trial attorneys is our mastery of the complex medical and scientific issues related to numerous particular toxins and exposures exposure. Our depth of scientific understanding, coupled with long-standing relationships with prominent experts, positions us well to defend the interests of our clients in science-based litigation.

We have served as national science counsel and vetted hundreds of scientific and medical experts in connection with mass toxic tort litigation, both in federal and state courts. We have successfully precluded plaintiff experts around the country under Daubert and Frye.

Our team leadership includes lawyers with educational backgrounds in epidemiology, chemistry, biology, and genetics, which gives us deeper insight and a competitive edge when litigating against our opponents.

In addition, we regularly partner with science experts to lecture and write on emerging scientific issues such as nanotechnology and epigenetics.

As pioneers in recognizing the legal and business risks and opportunities associated with nanotechnologies, our attorneys have published and lectured widely, driving the conversation around nanomaterials and the law.

Leadership

• Former Chair of the American Bar Association (ABA) Nanotechnology Committee
• Instructor, “Patenting Nanotechnology,” Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore, India, March 2008

Representative Publications

• “New Evidence That Carbon Nanotubes Have Potential to Cause Mesothelioma,” ARIAS-US Quarterly, Spring 2018
• “Nanotechnology: The Next Mass Tort?” ABA Mass Torts Litigation, August 15, 2017
• “New EPA Reporting Rule Requires Companies to Register Chemicals Containing Nanoscale Materials,” DRI Toxic Torts, June 9, 2017
• “How to Evaluate the Emerging Risks of Nanotechnology,” Business Insurance, February 24, 2013
• “Taming Nanotechnology’s Potential Risks,” IndustryWeek, October 17, 2012
• “Nanotechnology: Something So Little Should Not Be Allowed to Get Too Big!,” 2009 

Representative Presentations

• “Nanotechnology: Introduction to the Science, Regulation and Emerging Risks,” AIRROC Summer Membership Meeting, July 19, 2017
• “What’s Coming Now and in the Future: A Roundtable Chat on Emerging Issues in Talc, Nanotechnology, and Marijuana,” Goldberg Segalla Toxic Torts and Environmental Law Seminar, May 23, 2017
• “Emerging Risks – New and Evolving, Nanotechnology,” ARIAS U.S. Spring Conference, Naples, FL, May 3, 2017
• “Legal and Insurance Coverage Implications of Nanotechnology,” IRUA’s Reinsurance Emerging Risks Seminar, New York, March 9, 2016
• “Emerging Risks from Nanotechnology,” 2013 New Jersey State Bar Association, New Brunswick, NJ, January 22, 2013
• “Emerging Risks: The Perennial Contenders: Nanotechnology,” 2012 Perrin Conference on Emerging Risks on Dual Frontiers: Perspectives on Potential Liabilities in the New Decade, London, UK, April 12-13, 2012
• “Nanotechnology — What Is It and Why Should We Care?” International Association of Claim Professionals, June 3, 2010
• “Nanotechnology and its Impact on Insurance Industry,” Client CLE, 2008
• “Nanotechnology:  Something So Little Should Not Be Allowed to Get Too Big,” Federation of Defense and Corporate Counsel Winter Meeting, March 2007