Today we have another guest post from friend-of-the-Blog, Dick Dean at Tucker Ellis.  He’s familiar with the ongoing Pradaxa litigation and is pleased with the preemption pummeling Pradaxa plaintiffs have been receiving.  Here’s his post about yet another favorable decision from the state-court Pradaxa proceedings in Connecticut.  With decisions like this, who needs snap

Lyons v. Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 2020 WL 5835125 (N.D. Ga. Sept. 29, 2020), was a wrongful death action alleging that the anticoagulant drug Pradaxa was defective and not accompanied by adequate warnings that blood plasma concentrations should be monitored and that certain patient characteristics, such as age, renal impairments, and concomitant statin

Various plaintiff-side consortia have taken it into their heads to sue every manufacturer of so-called “novel oral anticoagulants” because these products, gasp, can cause serious, and sometime fatal, bleeding incidents.  Fortunately, on the whole the plaintiffs haven’t done so well with these cases – losing almost all the trials – because jurors can be taught

Confident prescribing physicians and implanting surgeons are the best “learned” intermediaries.  They’re experienced at what they do and aren’t intimidated by plaintiffs’ counsel and their threats of malpractice claims if they don’t testify the way plaintiffs want them to.  Confident learned intermediaries stand by their medical decisions.  Thus a confident learned intermediary’s testimony will defeat causation as a matter of law by stating that, notwithstanding a poor result, the treatment provided was standard of care, and even in hindsight they would not do anything different.  Because we encountered many stand up learned intermediary surgeons in the Bone Screw litigation, several of the relatively early decisions from the 1999-2001 timeframe are Bone Screw cases.Continue Reading Confident Learned Intermediaries Defeat Warning Causation