PLENTY OF LIFE (SCIENCES) LEFT - The IPO market may not be expected to come back to life any time soon, but as Law.com’s Jessie Yount reports, life sciences lawyers anticipate alternative financings and combinations to pick up in 2023, along with continued momentum for regulatory expertise. Lawyers who attended the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco earlier this month said the general mood of life sciences stakeholders ranged from “guardedly neutral” to “settled.” “There was a lot of positive energy of being together [in-person],” said Tony Jeffries, a corporate partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, based in Palo Alto, California, and Boulder, Colorado. “But the prevailing mood was cautious. People don’t expect a sudden spurt of dealmaking to come out of nowhere.”
DISTURBING VISUALS - A proposed rule that would require attorneys to give opposing counsel advance notice of the use of illustrative aids at trial would be difficult to follow and undercut trial strategies, lawyers said in testimony to a federal judicial rules committee on Friday. As Law.com’s Avalon Zoppo reports, the goal of the advance disclosure proposal is to prevent misleading or unfairly prejudicial illustrative aids from being presented to juries. But Georgia personal injury attorney Ryan Babcock told the U.S. Judicial Conference’s Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules that one main problem with the proposal is that it doesn’t define what constitutes an “illustrative aid.” He also expressed concern that the proposal as written wouldn’t allow for the type of spontaneity trials sometimes require. “I’m concerned that [the rule] would prove unworkable in practice. Trials are dynamic and many visuals may not be prepared a great deal of time in advance,” Babcock said.
