The legal battle between Sanofi-Aventis and LG Chemical over the copyright transfer of Zemiglo, an antidiabetic drug called the DPP-4 (dipeptidyl peptidase-4) inhibitor, has entered into the main round. Sanofi사노피 submitted the sales report of the medicine to the court, allowing LG ChemicalLG화학 to know the details of its marketing activities.
Sanofi and LG have been going on a suit for damages regarding the copyright transfer of Zemiglo since September. Sanofi filed a civil suit against LG Chemical and Daewoong Pharmaceutical대웅제약 in January last year to compensate the loss of 210 million won ($187,000) incurred by canceling the Zemiglo contract. LG Chemical pushed back, however, saying Sanofi had not sincerely carried out its marketing activity
LG Chemical, formerly LG Life and Sciences, and Sanofi signed a contract in October 2012 to sell Zemiglo together. As the sales of the medicine fell short of expectations, however, LG Life and Sciences notified Sanofi in December 2016 that it would cancel the contract even though they had a considerable period remaining on it. Later LG Life and Sciences made an agreement with Daewoong to sell Zemiglo and has since been selling it.
On Friday, the Seoul Central District Court went on the damage suit filed by Sanofi against LG Life and Sciences. Sanofi submitted data detailing Zemiglo’s sales and PR records in separate compact disks, as LG Chemical had requested.
Specifically, LG Chemical asked Sanofi to provide assembled data concerning the names of sales people (on condition of anonymity), hospitals (on partial anonymity, and doctors (on anonymity), as well as phone numbers and detailed execution records. The Korean company also demanded to know Sanofi’s PR activities by month, PR expenses on specific targets and their detailed distribution.
Sanofi submitted its sales activities of September 2015. LG Chemical had requested the record for the third quarter of 2015, but Sanofi said it decided to send the one-month record first, citing the enormous volume of the three months’ records.
As Sanofi handed in the data in the morning of the day when the lawsuit was held, however, giving LG Chemical and the court not enough time to review it and forcing them to put off the full-scale battle to another trial day. "Because the volume was too huge, we couldn’t upload it on the electronic litigation, and therefore we had to submit them in CD,” Sanofi’s legal agent said. “It took time because we had to check raw data as it seemed to be of little help in solving the issue.”
To examine the large data, Sanofi also proposed LG Chemical to have evidence report appraised by professional accountants by separately shouldering the costs, but LG Chemical rejected the proposal. The court decided to continue the trial after LG Chemical reviewed the document submitted by Sanofi.