Some of us belong to the Food and Drug Law Institute. One benefit of FDLI membership is a daily newsletter on FDA-related issues. The other day that newsletter’s top two links were both COVID-19 related – and we found both of them concerning.
The first item the newsletter featured was this story on “The
Every now and then something happens that’s unique. It’s hardly unique for defense counsel to send us a case, with his/her client’s consent and invite us to blog about it – but only once in twelve years has that happened where the result was a loss. That decision was Mantgem v. Spinal Kinetics, No.
This post is a little different. Several of my colleagues – Reed Smith attorneys Robert J. Hill, Joseph W. Metro, Kevin M. Madagan, Andrew Y. Lu, Sung W. Park, Janine R. Tougas – wrote a client alert on the four recent executive orders that concerned pharmaceutical pricing. We had
As consumers, and connoisseurs, of personal jurisdiction precedent, we were interested in the latest turn in Thalidomide-related litigation in Pennsylvania. You can see our prior posts about the former – and extremely time barred – personal injury litigation, here and here. The personal jurisdiction angle was mentioned more recently in a 360 (that is,
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently decided Walsh v. BASF Corp., ___ A.3d ___, 2020 WL 4135151 (Pa. July 21, 2020), reaffirming product identification as an essential element of product liability.
Below, the Superior Court had turned a trial court’s routine Fryebert-like exclusion ruling in a chemical exposure case into scary new precedent in
One of the cases we follow closely, with daily searches, is Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. v. Albrecht, 139 S. Ct. 1668 (U.S. 2019). It’s an implied preemption case, so while we like to think we catch all the drug/device cases anyway, Albrecht can affect preemption in a wide variety of tort situations.
We’d
As consumers, and connoisseurs, of personal jurisdiction precedent, we write today to consider the latest jurisdictional mess that has arisen, this time in talc litigation. Two courts, deciding the same jurisdictional issue on the same set of facts in the same week, have reached diametrically opposed decisions. The current contretemps concerns “Shimmer” – a minor
Here is another post from our junior blogger-in-training, Dean Balaes. He tackles one of the blog’s favorite subjects, removal before service to bring our readers the skinny on the first case where a plaintiff attempted to interpose a COVID-19 objection to snap removal, unsuccessfully. Since other plaintiffs might try the same thing, that makes
There but for the grace of [fill in your preferred deity] go we. . . .
We’re speaking about Wexler v. Dorsey & Whitney LLP, ___ F. Appx. ___, 2020 WL 3864950 (2d Cir. July 9, 2020) (“Wexler III”). Like us, the defendant law firm in Wexler operates a legal blog. Like
We’ve been watching the evolution of the Supreme Court’s thinking on First Amendment review of “speaker” and “content” specific prior restraints since we first noticed that emerging doctrine in the pharmaceutical detailing case, Sorrell v. IMS Health, Inc., 564 U.S. 552 (2011). In Sorrell, however, it was unclear how much (if any) more