HeartFlow makes software that turns a CT scan into a 3D model of the heart. It recently filed a 180-page IP complaint against a competitor. The interesting part isn't the lawsuit.
HeartFlow didn't lose its competitive advantage when its long-term consultant, Dr James Min, left the business. It lost it the moment the company's GTM architecture, clinical positioning, and reimbursement strategy were in the mind of one consultant, not an employee, and four years in, they were incorporating a company into the same therapy space.
The lawsuit was filed in April. The exposure arrived in 2012.
This is the thing the five major medical device IP cases of the last five years have in common, and it's not what the legal commentary focuses on.
Johnson and Johnson, Insulet, MicroVention, HeartFlow. Each complaint describes a departure. Each case is really about a dependency that pre-dated it.
The individual who left wasn't just technically capable. They were the container in which the commercial knowledge lived. The NDA wasn't protecting an asset. It was protecting the illusion that the asset existed inside the company rather than inside a person.
Medical Device companies do this deliberately. Not out of negligence. Because it works.
The fastest route to market credibility in a new therapy area is to hire the person who already has it. The VP who ran the clinical adoption programme at the competitor. A consultant who knows which IDNs will move early and which will wait for Level 1 evidence, and why. Someone with relationships at the three academic centres that everyone else treats as gatekeepers.
You buy the knowledge by hiring the person. It's efficient. It's rational.
And it means the knowledge is, in a very practical sense, on loan.
The $452 million Insulet verdict will make legal teams nervous. It won't change the underlying structure, because the underlying structure isn't a legal problem.
It is a commercial architecture problem.
Companies will keep hiring for embedded market knowledge because the alternative, building that knowledge slowly, from the inside, without the shortcut of the experienced hire, is slower and more expensive than the litigation risk. What changes is the question companies ask before they make the hire.
Not "what does this person know?" but "where does this knowledge live once they're gone?"
Not "what does the NDA cover?" but "what would still exist if they left on Friday?"
The HeartFlow complaint is 180 pages long. The more useful document is about four lines: who knows your GTM architecture, where it is documented, what would survive their departure, and when you last checked.
Most medical device companies can't answer question four.