There’s a reason plaintiffs hate removal before service – “snap removal.” It has the potential to wreak havoc on their mass tort business models, which are largely based on confronting defendants with as many cases as possible in the worst jurisdictions possible. While federal courts are hardly perfect, they are usually better than the state-court
FDA Nonacquiescence Strategy Fails In Evergreening Case
One of the advantages that the FDA (and other government agencies) have over other litigants is that it gets to ignore court decisions it doesn’t like, in hopes of trying again later in what the Agency considers a more favorable forum. Here’s how one court described the same policy by a different agency:
Understood in
Quasi-Guest Post – Plaintiffs’ Beast of Burden: Adverse Event Reports Precede Causation
We’re calling this a “quasi” guest post because the author, Reed Smith‘s Dean Balaes, is actually trying out to join our blogging team. This is his inaugural post, of what we hope will be many more. This particular post addresses the causation aspects of a case, Gayle v. Pfizer, Inc., ___ F.
On Newly Acquired Information
We’ve noticed quite a few prescription drug preemption decisions lately involving “newly acquired information.” That’s because the Supreme Court doubled down in Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. v. Albrecht, 139 S. Ct. 1668 (U.S. 2019), on the boundary of impossibility preemption being set by a defendant’s ability to utilize the FDA’s “changes being effected”
Post-Albrecht Preemption Persistently Pummels Pradaxa Plaintiffs
Not long ago, in our “Post-Albrecht Preemption Pummels Pradaxa Plaintiffs” post we discussed several recent favorable preemption decisions in product liability litigation involving that drug: Ridings v. Maurice, ___ F. Supp.3d ___, 2020 WL 1264178 (Mag. W.D. Mo. March 16, 2020), Adkins v. Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 2020 WL 1704646 (Conn.
Preemption and Second-Guessing FDA Classifications
The “fraud on the FDA” claim that the Supreme Court held preempted in Buckman Co. v. Plaintiffs Legal Committee, 531 U.S. 341 (2001), was actually the most extreme form of a private plaintiff second-guessing the result of an FDA process classifying a regulated product. Plaintiffs claimed that, because of purported “fraud” in the §510(k)
No FDCA-Based Negligence Per Se in Texas
Back during the Orthopedic Bone Screw mass tort litigation, one of major avenues of attack on the plaintiffs’ novel claims was to pursue every state-law avenue for rejecting the assertion of negligence per se predicated on supposed violations of the Food, Drug & Cosmetic Act (“FDCA”). That approach originally led us to 21 U.S.C. §337(a),
Post-Albrecht Preemption Pummels Pradaxa Plaintiffs
Two of longest recent entries in our Post-Levine Drug/Vaccine Preemption Cheat Sheet are Pradaxa wins. Adkins v. Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc., slip op., 2020 WL 1704646 (Conn. Super. March 13, 2020) (#106), and Ridings v. Maurice, ___ F. Supp.3d ___, 2020 WL 1264178 (Mag. W.D. Mo. March 16, 2020) (#108). There’s also
Spanish Plaintiffs’ Sad Song – I Can’t Get No Jurisdiction
With apologies to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (who wouldn’t have jurisdiction either, being UK citizens), that is what the Sixth Circuit told a pack of Spanish plaintiffs recently in In Re DePuy Orthopædics, Inc. ASR Hip Implant Products Liability Litigation, ___ F.3d ___, 2020 WL 1482384 (6th Cir. March 27, 2020).
All companies
Complete Summary Judgment in Remanded Pelvic Mesh Case
The remanded pelvic mesh case, Sherer-Smith v. C.R. Bard, Inc., was recently wiped from the docket by summary judgment. See 2020 WL 1470962 (W.D. Wis. March 26, 2020). That’s news because, except for a couple of odd-ball cases (see Gray v. C. R. Bard, Inc., 2019 WL 6521972 (S.D.W. Va. Dec. 3,