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This post comes solely from the Cozen O’Connor side of this blog.

 

Last week, the Judge in the Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT) MDL threw out an over $140 million jury verdict. In re Testosterone Replacement Therapy Prods. Liab. Litig. Coordinated Pretrial Proceedings, 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 111724 (N.D. Ill. July 5, 2018). It wasn’t the first time that the testosterone MDL court did something like that. Last December, it threw out a $150 million verdict. That’s almost $300 million in verdicts total. It’s got to take some strength to toss such hefty verdicts—testosterone or not.

In each instance, the court found the jury’s verdict to be so internally inconsistent that it required a new trial. In the verdict tossed last week, the jury found for the defendants on a failure to warn claim based in strict liability claim but found for the plaintiff on a failure to warn claim based in negligence. That sure does seem inconsistent.

Each claim turned on the same two disputed elements: (i) whether the TRT product, AndroGel, was unreasonably dangerous and (ii) whether its unreasonable dangerousness was a cause in fact and legal cause of the plaintiff’s injury (a heart attack). Id. at *419. In an attempt to save the verdict, plaintiff’s attorneys tried to reconcile these two findings. They argued that the strict liability claim had a different focus from the negligence claim. The strict liability claim focused on the AndroGel product itself and whether its deficient warnings caused plaintiff’s heart attack, while the negligence claim focused on defendants’ conduct and whether their negligence caused plaintiff’s heart attack. Id. at *420.

Um . . . . Okay. That does describe a different focus. But, either way, whether viewed as a product with deficient warnings or as defendants who negligently provided deficient warnings, the jury was ultimately answering the same question: did the AndroGel cause the heart attack? The causation questions were precisely the same:

[Plaintiff] has not articulated any theory, supported by evidence, of how [defendants’] breach of its duty of care could have been the cause in fact and legal cause of [Plaintiff’s] heart attack unless AndroGel itself was a cause in fact and legal cause of the heart attack. As [defendants] put the point in [their] reply, regardless of what the elements of each claim “focus on,” the claims share an essential causation question—whether AndroGel caused [plaintiff’s] heart attack.

Id. at *422. The court threw out the jury’s verdicts on both claims:

The verdicts on these claims are inconsistent under the instructions given to the jury. When this happens, the Court cannot accept one of the two inconsistent verdicts while discarding the other; both of them have to go.

Id. at *424-25.

But the jury also found for plaintiff on a misrepresentation claim, and that claim did not require a finding of “unreasonable dangerousness,” be it through deficient warnings or otherwise. Accordingly, the court found that this particular pro-plaintiff verdict was not necessarily irreconcilable with the jury’s finding against plaintiff on the strict liability claim. Id. at *425. Yet the court ordered a new trial on the misrepresentation claim too. It was not sufficiently distinct and separable from the other claims to protect against injustice resulting from two separate trials with separate verdicts. In particular, the jury received a single causation instruction for all claims:

[T]he Court does not believe that it can appropriately order a new trial limited to the negligence and strict liability claims while keeping the misrepresentation verdicts intact. A court may order a partial new trial only if “it clearly appears that the issue to be retried is so distinct and separable from the others that a trial of it alone may be had without injustice.” In this case, one of the key disputed issues was causation, specifically whether AndroGel cased [plaintiff’s] heart attack. The jury was given a single causation instruction that covered all of the claims. Thus the issue of causation on the two claims that have to be retried due to the inconsistency of the jury’s verdicts is anything but “distinct and separable” from the issue of causation on the misrepresentation claims. For this reason, the Court concludes, it would be impossible to limit a new trial to the inconsistent claims “without injustice.” The appropriate remedy for the jury’s inconsistent verdicts on the strict liability and negligence claims is “[a] new trial on all claims.”

Id. at *426-27.

So out goes another hefty jury verdict in the testosterone MDL. The last time the MDL court did this, when it tossed out the $150 million verdict in December 2017, the jury at the second trial awarded $3.2 million. That’s not a small verdict, but it’s almost $147 million smaller than the first verdict. That’s a pretty significant, as they say, delta. So let’s see what happens in the new trial this time.