This is a guest post from John Vaughan, a partner at Holland & Knight who has been in-house at both pharma and tech companies, which gives him some extra insights into the decision discussed below. As with all guest posts, the author gets all the credit and blame for the content of the post

Eric Alexander
The Appealability of Remand Orders Can Affect Removal Strategy
We have written many times, as recently as Tuesday, that the practice of plaintiff lawyers to include patently inapplicable claims among a laundry list of causes of action asserted in complaints is lazy, if not problematic. It is rare to see a plaintiff self-regulate and cull down an overbroad pleading without a defense motion…
Class Complaint Fails in OTC Drug MDL
When it comes to MDLs that concern a bunch of cases about a drug or device, they typically have a name like “In re [name of product(s)] Product Liability Litigation” or “In re [name of product(s) Marketing and Sales Practices Litigation.” In theory, the first group of MDLs involves, shockingly, product…
Plaintiffs Fail to Backdoor Expansive Early Discovery in GLP-1 MDL
We have no personal knowledge of the litigation concerning GLP-1 receptor agonist medications and the Blog has not posted on it yet, but we do know something about litigation over widely used prescription medications. Over the decades, there have been many drugs or classes of drugs that became “blockbusters” because they were widely prescribed to…
No Debating Pennsylvania’s Rejection of Strict Liability for Implantable Medical Devices
This is from the non-Dechert part of the Blog.
Over the years, the Blog has had many, many posts related to the issue of whether Pennsylvania recognized any form of strict liability in product liability actions against prescription medical products. In addition to the fact that several of the principal authors of the Blog have…
Guest Post: Talc Woes Continue To Grow In Canada
When it comes to legal developments in the nation to our north, we are happy to defer to actual Canadian lawyers. Here, we present a guest post from Ashley Paterson and Gina Azer of Bennett Jones. This is Ashley’s second guest post, which means she is close to qualifying for the coveted FOB (friend…
Has Albrecht Been Undone?
We do not mean the German Renaissance painter and thinker Albrecht Dürer. His work, while a poor cousin to that of some famous contemporaries to the south, remains as is. We mean the Supreme Court’s decision in Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. v. Albrecht, 587 U.S. 299 (2019), which has been touted for the…
The Intersection of Telehealth, Privacy, and Medical Devices
One good thing that occurred during the pandemic was the expansion of telehealth. Telehealth existed already and probably would have been expanding anyway, but patient willingness to get care from home instead of risking exposure from an in-person visit paired well with provider interest in not going to or even having to maintain an office. …
Another Pretty Potent Painkiller Preemption Decision
Even though lawyers who bill for their time defending product liability cases might favor those cases sticking around and plaintiffs getting many chances before inevitable dismissals with prejudice, we have been clear that we think plaintiffs should not get to re-plead around preemption once courts have defined the preempted path. There seems to be an…
Wasting Time Looking For A Dime
We are unabashedly pro-science. In our cases, we are usually on the side of good science against bad or no science. In discussing large-scale product liability litigation, we have said many times how bad science and the risk of attendant litigation can negatively impact the development of new products. Even if we were so naïve…