Late last year we happily blogged about Utts v. Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., ___ F. Supp.3d ___, 2016 WL 7429449 (S.D.N.Y. Dec. 23, 2016), chiefly because it held that design defect claims against a branded prescription drug (Eliquis) were preempted under the impossibility preemption reasoning in PLIVA, Inc. v. Mensing, 564 U.S. 604 (2011),
We like bright lines in the law. They streamline arguments for lawyers and, more important, they make it easier for non-lawyers to conduct their affairs with some degree of predictability. Rear-end a car and you’re liable, even if the other guy stopped short. Leave a sponge behind in a patient’s abdomen, and you and your
One of the issues that the federal Civil Rules Committee’s discovery subcommittee considered, but that eventually fell by the wayside, on the way to the 2015 discovery rules amendments, were proposals to convert to a “requestor pays” discovery system. That would be a very significant change, and one of the criticisms that the other
This post comes from the Cozen O’Connor side of the blog.
Plaintiffs and defendants have now completed briefing before the Fifth Circuit on defendants’ appeal of the $498 million verdict in the second bellwether trial of the Pinnacle hip implant MDL. Obviously, there is a lot riding on this appeal. In March, we laid out
No one can be all that happy with how the Accutane mass tort proceeding has played out in New Jersey. We have no involvement in that proceeding, but we have monitored it from afar, and it has been extraordinarily contentious. The rub is that the parties have very little to show for the effort. The
May 10 is an important day in the history of the law. On this date, way back in 1893, the Supreme Court ruled that the tomato is a vegetable, not a fruit. The case was called Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893). The issue concerned application of the Tariff Act of 1883, which
We’ve all had cases where plaintiffs try to use their prescribers and treaters as their experts on everything from failure to warn and causation to design defect and company conduct. Even on the medical aspects of the case, a treater needs to offer more than just an unsupported general conclusion in order to withstand scrutiny
As our post-Levine preemption cheat sheet demonstrates, Mensing/Bartlett preemption is breathing down the necks of all prescription drug design defect claims. Recent cases finding preemption of design defect claims due to the need for FDA pre-approval of “major” or “moderate” design changes (basically, anything that could be causal in a product liability
Executions by lethal injection are in the news. Arkansas recently executed four inmates in just eight days. One of the drugs that it uses for its three-drug lethal injection protocol was set to move beyond its expiration date. And, apparently, Arkansas wanted to use them before that happened. It seems that states are finding
This guest post by Andrew C. Bernasconi, of Counsel at Reed Smith, is about a hopeful development in a False Claims Act case we’ve already blogged about once. The previous post queried, what happens when a FCA relator, blinded by the dollar signs in his/her eyes, resorts to questionable means to gin up