We’ve used the phrase “one-two punch” before in the blog to describe a pair of legal decisions concerning the same product. Usually, our clients have been on the winning side, but that’s not always true, particularly in cases coming out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In November, the Pennsylvania appellate courts, in gynecomastia litigation, dealt defendants two
Picture this. Invitations go out for a Thanksgiving get-together and the host and expected guests together sort out who will bring what foods and how everything will be served. A sideboard is loaded up with the traditional holiday foods, along with a collection of everyone’s quirky favorite salad items to allow easy compilation of a
When we discuss the learned intermediary rule, it is typically in the context of protecting our drug and device manufacturer clients. If a manufacturer warned the doctor, it discharged its duties, and a plaintiff should not be able to claim that he or she was not directly warned. We do not often represent pharmacies, but
As we approach the end of the year, we turn to reflecting on the events of the passing year. We do it here on the DDL blog with our best of and worst of posts. It is often a time to consider just how much (or how little) was accomplished in the course of a
In prescription medical product liability litigation, size matters. It doesn’t matter as much as having good products and winning arguments, but when the name of the game on the other side is to drag defendants into pro-plaintiff forums and then use every procedural trick in the book to try to “ring the bell” on some
We have always wondered why judges are hesitant to sever the claims of plaintiffs who never should have joined their claims together in the first place. You know what we mean—multiple plaintiffs, sometimes dozens of them, who join their claims together in one complaint based only on the allegation that they used the same or
We are rounding the final curve of the Fall academic calendar, so now come the sessions in the litigation class we teach at Penn Law when we discuss story-telling. It is not as if we have anything novel to say. The best (most attention-getting, understandable, memorable, and persuasive) stories are ones we have already heard
Sort of like hail in Alabama. It happens, but when it does it’s an event. Not like say picking a perfect NCAA March Madness bracket (1 in 2.4 trillion). Maybe more like the chance of getting struck by lightning in a lifetime (1 in 13,000). In any case, a California trial court decision finding no
Manufacturers supervising medical doctors? In two words, they don’t. Yet plaintiffs, particularly in cases where preemption forecloses more normal product liability claims, try to get courts to impose such duties. We took a look at that issue back during the early days of the blog, when it was still a Bexis/Herrmann operation, in our September
We write today fresh from a short cruise to celebrate a milestone birthday of the Drug and Device Law Dowager Countess. We view cruising, and the limitations of its inevitable confinement, as the perfect antidote to the often-unrelieved breakneck pace of our daily lives. And this cruise was no exception. We eschewed shore excursions in