JARROD Ritchie risked everything he owned in a four-year legal battle with a world pharmaceutical giant - and won.
When the career scientist left his job at GlaxoSmithKline to start up a rival company, he knew his former employer would be unhappy but he did not expect it to try to use the law to allegedly tarnish his professional reputation and block him from working in the industry he had spent years in.
Jarrod Ritchie, TPI Enterprises.
The industry at the heart of the dispute is the extraction of opiate alkaloids from Tasmanian poppies for use in pain-relief drugs such as morphine. Tasmania supplies 40% of the world's legal opiates and, until recently, the industry was dominated by GSK and Tasmanian Alkaloids, owned by Johnson & Johnson.
But Mr Ritchie saw an opportunity to take on the established players, and in December 2003 left his senior position at GSK to start up his own company, TPI Enterprises, which later won the backing of several dozen wealthy investors.
Mr Ritchie acknowledged he had been working on his plans for TPI during his final months at GSK, but did so without compromising his work, he said.
The next year, GSK launched a legal challenge to Mr Ritchie, arguing he was taking advantage of knowledge he had gained in the seven years he worked at the company's poppy plant at Port Fairy, Victoria.
Mr Ritchie chose to fight the claim, selling all his personal assets to fund his defence, and at one stage representing himself due to limited resources.
GSK's initial claim against Mr Ritchie was wide-ranging, seeking an injunction to block him from using knowledge gained in his time at the company, which amounted to 14 box folders. If it succeeded, the injunction would have effectively crippled TPI.
But four days before the trial, GSK shrunk its statement of claim, limiting the knowledge it was seeking to prevent Mr Ritchie from using to about 30 points of similarity between the process used by GSK and TPI in extracting opiate alkaloids from the poppies. As part of an extensive discovery process, the court gave lawyers for GSK access to TPI's manufacturing facility in Cressy in northern Tasmania.
Mr Ritchie, the primary defendant, and TPI, the secondary defendant, later turned to lawyers at Arnold Bloch Leibler to help with their defence. Twice during the proceedings the defendants made offers to GSK to settle the case, but both were rejected.
The case was heard in the Victorian Supreme Court before Justice David Harper in a month-long trial last October. The judgement was delivered in May, but was suppressed at the request of GSK until yesterday because it contained confidential information. The public version of the judgement excludes the secret information.
The judgement was a comprehensive rebuke of GSK, with Justice Harper dismissing every claim made against Mr Ritchie and TPI. "I have been unable to find that any of the claims made by the plaintiff have been proved," Justice Harper said.
"The link between what was confidential and what was misused, an essential link in a claim based upon the misuse of confidential information, had not been carefully drawn."
A relieved Mr Ritchie said he had little option but to continue the battle.
"Once proceedings against you are initiated and it's about your credibility, especially as my background's science, any damage to your credibility goes on forever," he said.
"I really didn't have an option but to fight it out. Believe me, there are many times I would have liked to have ended."
GSK said it was considering its options, including an appeal.
"GSK places great value in our intellectual property assets and we are therefore very disappointed with this decision," the company said.
Both of the established players in the market used petroleum-based solvents to extract the opium from poppy heads, but TPI developed a water alternative considered safer and cheaper.
The legal dispute came as TPI was attempting to pass the legal and commercial hurdles to break into the market for processing poppies.
Mr Ritchie said the controversy led to an apparent unwillingness by some poppy farmers to sign supply deals with TPI.
To overcome the reluctance, the company offered farmers a 25% increase in prices from the previous year and engaged its financier, rural specialists Rabobank, to promote the company to its poppy-growing customers.
"I was surprised the lengths they went to," Mr Ritchie said of GSK.