IANAL, but reverse engineering process is almost certainly not illegal. Don't know where you got that idea. If they cribbing off a "process patent" then it's

IANAL, but reverse engineering process is almost certainly not illegal. Don't know where you got that idea. If they cribbing off a "process patent" then it's not reverse engineering, though, IIRC, for most drugs companies don't bother getting a process patent because they are very difficult to enforce (to enforce such a patent, you need a warrant to go onto a competitor's premises and inspect their process, and judges are very very unlikely to issue such a warrant because if they set a low bar precedent for such actions, then basically everyone is going to start issuing spurious claims), so everyone would rather just build their moat with trade secrets than process patents. Also, I believe if you crib off of a process patent to do a one-off run or research project it is not illegal, only commercializing it is. One (ostensible) point of patents is to encourage sharing and desiloing knowledge and keep things out of the dark so that we can learn from each other.