This post is from the non-Reed Smith side of the blog.
The plaintiff thought she had a strong summary judgment opposition. She included the deposition testimony of her prescribing doctor, who suggested that Boston Scientific’s warnings for the pelvic mesh device were inadequate. And she included her own affidavit, in which she said that she wouldn’t have agreed to let her doctor implant that device in her if she’d known that it could cause the negative life changing conditions that she allegedly later suffered. Plaintiff thought her opposition was enough to save her failure to warn claim. It wasn’t. The MDL court granted partial summary judgment. It turned out that Plaintiff’s opposition papers contained a big gap—no evidence of proximate causation. Plaintiff offered no evidence that her doctor read Boston Scientific’s Directions for Use (“DFU”). And, if her prescribing doctor didn’t read the DFU, changing it to include the allegedly proper warning wouldn’t have changed anything, particularly her doctor’s decision to prescribe.
That wasn’t the end for plaintiff, though. She had other claims that survived and that she could take to trial. That trial, however, would happen before a different court. After its summary judgment decision and completing other pretrial matters, the MDL court transferred the case back to the original transferor court for trial.
Plaintiff saw this as an opportunity. She moved the new court to reconsider the MDL court’s summary judgment decision. Her basis was that, in fact, her prescribing doctor had read the DFU. The plaintiff had simply failed to present that portion of his deposition testimony to the MDL court. On that basis, she asked the new trial court to change the MDL court’s decision and deny summary judgment against the failure to warn claim.
No luck. She lost her reconsideration motion.
So, with no failure to warn claim, Plaintiff went to trial.
She lost there too.
Undaunted and still fighting to revive her failure to warn claim, plaintiff appealed to the Fourth Circuit. She challenged both the MDL court’s original summary judgment decision and the trial court’s denial of her motion to reconsider that decision.
And she lost again.
All of this is described in the Fourth Circuit’s recent opinion. Carlton v. Boston Scientific Corp., 2017 WL 1854278 (4th Cir. May 9, 2017). The Fourth Circuit saw plaintiff’s problems as both substantive and procedural. Substantively, a failure to warn claim cannot survive without evidence that the doctor would have read the warning. Id. at *3. Procedurally, it’s not the court’s job to find the evidence that supports proximate causation. It’s the parties’ job to present that evidence to the court: “The responsibility to comb through the record in search of facts relevant to summary judgment falls on the parties—not the court. We therefore affirm the MDL court’s partial summary judgment award.” Id.
Her procedural failings were particularly problematic on her challenge to the trial’s court’s denial of reconsideration. This wasn’t new evidence on which she was relying. It was evidence that had indisputably been available at the time the MDL court decided the summary judgment motion:
At oral argument, Appellant’s counsel asserted that in light of this late revelation, the MDL court’s summary judgment award constituted clear error causing manifest injustice. Not so. We have consistently affirmed denials of motions to reconsider summary judgment rulings where the motion is merely a vessel for the very evidence that was initially lacking in opposition to summary judgment. Significantly, the entirety of Dr. Kennelly’s deposition testimony was available well before summary judgment briefing, and the additional portions of testimony Appellant provided to the district court for “reconsideration” thus did not amount to the type of evidence constituting grounds for a valid motion for reconsideration. We therefore affirm the district court’s denial of Appellant’s motion for reconsideration.
Id. at *4.
While not for lack of fighting on plaintiff’s part, we suspect that this one is now finally over.