Yo! What’s goin’ on over in Joisey?
It wasn’t too long ago that New Jersey was one of the last places you’d want to be in if you were a drug or device manufacturer – litigating product liability claims, that is. To some extent that was ironic, because quite a few of our drug (not
We posted yesterday about the Texas appellate court’s dismissal of the appeal in Ledbetter v. Merck, the Vioxx case that resulted in a key defense precedent in the trial court.
Among other things, we wrote:
“Ledbetter had asked the court not only to dismiss the appeal, but also to dismiss the underlying lawsuit and
Ledbetter v. Merck was a big deal when it came down last year. Here’s what we wrote back then.
(Then, as now, Bexis played no role in writing posts about the case, since his firm is involved in the Vioxx defense. Blame Herrmann alone for what follows.)
Judge Randy Wilson, in Harris County, Texas,
The Service Employees International Union and the Teamsters have sued six law firms (including Beasley Allen, Girardi and Keese, and Levin Fishbein) for their handling of the Vioxx settlement. The complaint pleads that the law firms representing plaintiffs mishandled the Vioxx settlement, failing to provide money to cover lien rights of ERISA health plans.
Given
Lexecon v. Milberg Weiss, 523 U.S. 26 (1998), is, of course, the Supreme Court case that held that MDL transferee judges lack the power to try cases that were originally filed outside of the transferee court.
(Mass tort lawyers understood that sentence; others may not have. Here it is again, more simply: Suppose a
Today, the Supreme Court granted certiorari a third time in Philip Morris v. Williams, the oft appealed case involving a punitive damages award in the range of 100-1. See the order here (third page of PDF). The grant is limited, however, to the first issue, which is quite limited – it’s only whether a
There were a lot of hotshots at the ALI-ABA course on “Mass Litigation” in Charleston, SC, a couple of weeks ago.
One of those hotshots mused that it’s become awfully hard to predict where the MDL Panel will transfer a set of newly coordinated cases these days because the Panel has become a black box.
It’s been said that the third time’s the charm. Maybe that means that we’ll get it right this time.
Anyway, as regular readers of this blog know, Wyeth filed its principal merits brief in Wyeth v. Levine early last week. As night follows day, that means that all defense amicus briefs are due a
We’ve posted before about the problems that arise when a government hires private lawyers on a contingent fee basis to represent it.
Point of Law now alerts us to a new paper by Professor Martin Redish that argues that these arrangements are, at the very least, politically improper, and probably unconstitutional to boot.
Here’s my thesis: Bexis keeps winning all these cases just so Herrmann is saddled with the responsibility of writing ’em up on the blog. The SOB is a malingerer, pure and simple.
Today’s news is Sinclair v. Merck & Co, No. A-117-06, slip op. (N.J. June 4, 2008). We linked to it moments ago. And