Several of us (the Reed Smith side, obviously) recently attended the firm partners’ retreat. All our brainstorming about how to improve client service started us thinking about the blog.  In some ways, legal blogging’s not that much different than other legal services – we just don’t get paid for it, at least not directly.  Our intended readership follows us, to the extent they do, with the expectation (realistic, we hope) of learning things that they can use to help defeat drug/device product liability litigation.  That brings value to the industry (and indirectly to various clients), since a win anywhere helps defendants everywhere.

So where can we bring, or at least preserve, value to the industry/our clients through the blog? We thought about MDLs.  Defendants spend a great deal of money slogging their way through MDLs, and where possible we’d like to preserve whatever good we get out of them.  Depending on judicial predilection (Judge Bechtle didn’t; Judge Weinstein does), MDLs often include summary judgment and (less frequently) other dispositive motions concerning individuals or groups of plaintiffs.  Some of the motions are based on Daubert, but if not, they’re usually based on state law – learned intermediary, statute of limitations, other issues.

So what?

Here’s what. State-law-based rulings in MDLs involve judges in one jurisdiction, like Judge Weinstein in New York in Zyprexa, deciding issues presented by other states’ laws – say whether a failure to warn was causal under Louisiana law.  That’s fine for the MDL, but what about the rest of us?  Also, what about anybody after an MDL is (at long last) concluded?  What legal researcher would think to look in New York for a case possibly presenting a relevant fact pattern for a Louisiana motion?

Not too many.

We speak from experience.  When we’re putting together a summary judgment motion in some other case, whether one-off or a different MDL, where do we look for supportive precedent?  Why we look in the logical place, of course – the decisions of that particular state’s courts and federal decisions in the district and appellate courts responsible for that state.  That’s where we get the most bang for our research bucks. That’s doing our clients’ work in the most efficient manner.

So we don’t look in Florida, or New York, or Pennsylvania if we’re working on a case under Texas law.  It’s simply not cost effective, given the number of other jurisdictions and the relatively low likelihood of success.  Sometimes we run across something significant through checking lists of citations (colloquially known as “Shepardizing”) to relevant cases, but we’re not systematic.

But just because it’s not worthwhile in a given case to conduct such broader searches doesn’t mean that what’s out there isn’t worth knowing about.  In Zyprexa alone, Judge Weinstein granted dozens of summary judgments applying the law of at least half the states of the union. Those cases are useful precedent – if defense counsel can locate them in a way that doesn’t waste the client’s money.

That’s where we come in.  We’re bloggers.  We’re not getting paid for this.  We don’t have to be cost effective in the narrow sense that lawyers working for client X or client Y have to be.  We just have to do the research – and we have.

What follows will be incredibly boring to many of you, but we hope equally useful.  We’ve collected individual summary judgment decisions (unless we specify a different procedural posture) in various MDLs – no matter what jurisdiction they were in.  We’ve organized them by state, omitting decisions made by MDL courts applying their own forum’s law, since those cases would be found by searching “the usual suspects.” That means, if you’re researching Mississippi law, just look under “Mississippi law cases” in the list below, and there are the cases, no matter what MDL court decided them.

Caveat #1: As we’ve said many times, we don’t do the other side’s research for them.  These lists include only cases where the defendant won everything (or almost everything) under a particular state’s law.  As far as adverse MDL precedent is concerned, we make no representations whatsoever.  Yeah, we saw some bad cases while doing this research.  We’ve intentionally omitted them.

Caveat #2. We expect this list is under-inclusive. Why? To keep the searches manageable, we reviewed only cases where “product liability” appeared in the name of the case (the usual way that MDLs are named), and “[insert state name] law” appeared somewhere in the body of the opinion.  That means we searched “Alabama law,” not just “Alabama.”  Otherwise, we’d have gotten hits for every MDL case where one of the (often scores) of attorneys was from Alabama.  Still, we think our results are a lot better than nothing. We’re not aware of this kind of list having been compiled anywhere – at least anywhere that’s public.

Caveat #3. We’ve only included issues that we could see possibly arising in drug and device product liability litigation. If an MDL decision was favorable to the defendant only on, say, asbestos exposure product identification (the most common example by far), we have not included it.

Caveat #4. We have not included decisions that were driven by federal issues, such as Daubert or preemption.  Federal issues involve different research considerations, so that decisions from MDLs in different circuits are less useful.

So here goes. For the first time anywhere, pro-defense product liability MDL decisions organized by the jurisdiction of the law being applied.Continue Reading MDL Precedent Rescue – Big List