You might not want to read this post around mealtime. But it does offer food for thought on an old bete noire, negligence per se. Louie DePalma, a character in one of our all-time favorite sitcoms, Taxi, once hired a lawyer who advertised that if he lost a case, he’d “eat a bug”.
Well we think so. And apparently somebody else does so too. The “Health Expert Blog” has listed us among its “Top 50 Medical Ethics Blogs” under the heading Medical Law Blogs. We thank them for the recognition – deserved or not.
Twombly/Iqbal has (have?) a lot of us on the defense side looking more closely at pleadings. Here’s another idea to kick around – is it proper for an attorney simply to dump a slew of allegations from a document prepared by someone else – say, a complaint, consent decree, or other document filed
The aberrant Conte v. Wyeth, Inc., 85 Cal. Rptr.3d 299 (Cal. App. 2008), decision had its first birthday a couple of months ago – not that we’re celebrating, or anything.
It would be more accurate to say that we’re doing everything we can do to strangle Conte in its crib. If you’re new around
Two of the cases on our medical device preemption scorecard have been:
Johnson v. Endovascular Technologies, Inc., 2008 WL 3139424 (Cal. Super. May 19, 2008). Express warranty and failure to test claims are preempted under Riegel. Allegations amounting to fraud on the FDA are preempted by Buckman. Plaintiff has appealed this case.
McGuan v.
Appropriately – since here in Philadelphia we’re being snowed in (again) – today’s post concerns Winters v. Alza Corp., 2010 WL 446451, slip op. (S.D.N.Y. Feb. 4, 2010). Winters is an example of how remand motions should be decided – when federal courts don’t elevate docket control uber alles.
Winters is was originally filed
It is not always sunny in Philadelphia for product liability lawyers – especially defense lawyers like us. Faithful readers have heard us gripe about the state of Pennsylvania product liability law – see, for example, this and this – and with good reason. Pennsylvania strict liability law has been a confusing mess for years. The
Here’s what passes for our light reading lately: cases involving plaintiff lawyers griping about their fees. We recently posted about a battle royale among ex-partners in a plaintiff firm. Now we have a Second Circuit opinion where a plaintiff lawyer chafed under fee limitations imposed by Judge Weinstein in the Zyprexa MDL. Mulligan Law Firm
We covered the topic of product recalls being excludable as subsequent remedial measures in some detail in our Total Recall post, including a list of all the cases we were aware of (whether they involved drugs/devices or not) that had excluded recalls for this reason. There wasn’t a single federal court of appeals in the
Just the other day we brought you news that the British medical journal Lancet issued a full retraction of an purported scientific article by a plaintiffs’ expert in autism litigation. The author, who was at the time also serving as a plaintiff-side expert, described parts of his research in a manner that “have been proven to be false.”
Something similar seems to be happening in the Accutane litigation. There’s a new opinion, Palazzolo v. Hoffman-La Roche Inc., No. A-3789-07T3, slip op. (N.J. Super. App. Div. Feb. 3, 2010), in which another plaintiff’s expert has gotten called out for essentially the same thing – publishing an article in a medical journal that failed to accurately describe what was actually done.
Be ready to hold your nose, here’s what went down, and it ain’t pretty:
In Palazzolo the plaintiff’s expert, James Bremner, was hired to offer an opinion that Accutane caused depression and suicide. The sticky situation began when, in the words of the Court, “Plaintiffs paid Bremner to undertake a further study. There is no dispute that the study was commissioned specifically for use in this litigation.” Slip op. at 3. That study – bought and paid for by plaintiffs’ counsel – was nevertheless published at J. Douglas Bremner, M.D., et. al., “Functional Brain Imaging Alterations in Acne Patients Treated With Isotretinoin,” 162 Am. J. Psychiatry 983 (May 2005). Slip op. at 4. You can read the whole thing on line here.
Continue Reading Plaintiffs’ Experts And Peer Review Don’t Mix