Law360, New York (March 9, 2015, 10:22 AM EDT) -- Generic pharmaceuticals save consumers billions of dollars each year. To be sure, the Generic Pharmaceutical Association estimates that in the past decade alone, generic pharmaceuticals saved the United States health system approximately $1.46 trillion dollars.[1] Considering the enormous cost savings afforded by generic drugs, it comes as no surprise that brand name pharmaceutical companies have historically employed highly aggressive, and in some instances, unlawful tactics to prevent competing generic drugs from entering the market. These unlawful tactics range from fraudulently obtaining patents and initiating sham litigation, to providing large and unjustified payments to would-be rivals to stay out of the market, to product-hopping (also known as evergreening), where a branded manufacturer releases a new version of a pre-existing drug with only minor or no substantive improvements to prevent consumers from switching to lower-priced generic competitors....