Retail and specialty pharmacies look to Morgan Lewis’s interdisciplinary team of lawyers to advise on a broad range of issues—including healthcare regulatory, US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), transactional, compliance, employment, and litigation. Our experience in working with a wide array of pharmacies and other healthcare organizations—such as payors, distributors, and pharmaceutical manufacturers—allows us to provide strategic, results-oriented legal and compliance advice to our pharmacy clients. We advise both large chains and community pharmacies, as well as specialty pharmacies that offer long-term care, infusion therapy, hospice, nuclear pharmacy, and other specialty services.
Our pharmacy industry focus enables us to provide integrated legal guidance and manage a client’s interests with its various constituencies, including the government and payors, PBMs, patients, investors, business partners, and vendors.
Our team of lawyers includes nationally recognized thought leaders in healthcare regulatory, compliance, and enforcement matters. Our lawyers include a former deputy branch chief at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General and a counselor at HHS on congressional investigations; several former FDA lawyers; a former Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) lawyer who counseled on new CMS healthcare regulations; a licensed pharmacist who has advised retail and specialty pharmacies for decades; and many former US Department of Justice and state attorney general prosecutors who regularly advise on False Claims Act and DEA enforcement matters.
We work with pharmacies, drugstore chains, and retailers with pharmacy operations to design, implement, and assess innovative programs and corporate compliance initiatives to prevent potential problems before they occur. Our lawyers use an empirical, risk-based approach to help clients focus their resources on the areas with the most significant risk. We regularly assist regional and national pharmacy operations to assess legal and regulatory issues across numerous jurisdictions (for example, through the use of legal surveys) to enable our pharmacy clients to run their operations in a compliant and cost-effective fashion.
Beyond our work helping clients, Morgan Lewis lawyers are active in the healthcare sector as thought leaders and in moderating discussions on pressing pharmacy compliance issues, including working with pharmacy trade associations and helping lead the National Association of Chain Drug Stores’ Retail Pharmacy Compliance Roundtable.