For a few years, it seemed like we were blogging about the Weeks case every few months. Beyond providing an opportunity for temporal quippery, Weeks caught our attention because it was one of the holdout cases against the tide of cases rejecting Conte, the crappy California case that invented innovator liability. After the
Eric Alexander
Picky MDL Plaintiff Gets The Same Discovery Plate As Everyone Else
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…
Direct-Filed MDL Case On Thin Ice For Personal Jurisdiction
We are writing about a case that does not involve drugs or devices because it runs through some of the very same personal jurisdiction issues we have warned about post-Bauman. Adams v. NHL, MDL No, 14-2551, Case No. 15-cv-00472 (SRN/JSM), 2019 WL 5079980 (D. Minn. Oct. 10, 2019), is a case from the…
Federal Oversight For Plaintiff Lawyer Advertising
We write mostly about decisions in cases, with those mostly coming from judges. Occasionally, we will also comment on articles, amicus briefs, and official government pronouncements. We cannot remember the last time we explored a press release. In today’s political environment, speculation about what is contained in documents that purportedly exist but we cannot see…
Mixed Treatment Of Clinical Trial Liability On Summary Judgment
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. A jack of all trades is a master of none. These cutesy little phrases throw some derision toward one who possesses some knowledge in a bunch of areas. Representing drug and device companies in litigation can make a lawyer reject the negative interpretation of these phrases. We have…
Med Mal Case Dives Deep Into Device Regulation
Reading through Obermeier v. Northwestern Memorial Hosp., __ N.E.3d __, 2019 IL App. (1st) 170553 (Ill. App. Div. June 28, 2019), reminded us of scrolling through television channels in the middle of the day with time to kill. The opinion started off talking about the basic medical facts of the case and we were…
Common Sense Cert Petition On CAFA
We have written a number of times on CAFA, the Class Action Fairness Act. The decisions and subjects we have covered can be pretty technical and even numerical. After all, one of the central provisions of CAFA has a number in it: a “mass action” is one “in which monetary relied claims of 100…
Smoked Turkey For Barbecue Season
Our days of the week are mostly named based on Norse mythology, but our months are firmly Roman. May is named after the deity Maia, whose Roman version was honored for her role in the growth of plants. Her cousin Juno, the queen of the Roman gods, gave us the name for June. In their…
Double Dose Of Delaware Summary Judgment
There will come a time when there is no such thing as the local radio station. Not only will transmission not occur via radio waves, but there will be nothing local about it. There also may be no banter from the DJ, short for “disc jockey”–a reference to placing flat, round pieces of plastic called…
The Ripples Of The Fosamax Reversal
If we were to recap briefly our reactions to the Levine decision and ten years of decisions attempting to apply it, then we might say something like this. The Court’s creation of a clear evidence standard for conflict preemption in the context of warnings claims for branded drugs was both novel and misguided. The Court…