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JAMES M. BECK is Reed Smith's only Senior Life Sciences Policy Analyst, resident in the firm's Philadelphia office. He is the author of, among other things, Drug and Medical Device Product Liability Handbook (2004) (with Anthony Vale). He wrote the seminal law review article on off-label use cited by the Supreme Court in Buckman v. Plaintiffs Legal Committee. He has written more amicus briefs for the Product Liability Advisory Council than anyone else in the history of the organization, and in 2011 won PLAC's highest honor, the John P. Raleigh award. He has been a member of the American Law Institute (ALI) since 2005. He is the long-time editor of the newsletter of the ABA's Mass Torts Committee.  He is vice chair of the Class Actions and Multi-Plaintiff Litigation SLG of DRI's Drug and Device Committee.  He can be reached at jmbeck@reedsmith.com.  His LinkedIn page is here.

Clients often ask us whether the MDL Panel will coordinate their cases and, if so, in what district and before which judge. We’ve tried in the past to “Mak[e] Book On The MDL Panel,” but we limited our investigation to product liability cases.

A research associate at the Federal Judicial Center and a

Our stock in trade is words, but images can be more powerful.
Oddly enough, political cartoons that contain no words (and are not even funny) can be among the most powerful of all.
We loved the 1960s image (was it by Herblock?) of students protesting the Vietnam War outside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington,

We know, we know: Lawyers ain’t math majors.
But this requires only arithmetic, for heaven’s sake:
Three men were on a business trip and had to stay in a hotel over night. The price of the room was $30.00, so the men decided to split one room, three ways. Each one paid $10.00. Well after

We try not to wear out our welcome with our subscribers by publishing multiple posts in a single day, but there’s more breaking news that we feel compelled to report today. It’s in the Bausch & Lomb ReNu with MoistureLoc MDL. (Herrmann is writing this one up alone, since Bexis’s firm is involved in the

This just in:
(Actually, it came in late yesterday, but we were first busy and then tired. Sorry.)
In April 2008, the FDA recalled all lots of the drug Digitek (distributed by Mylan and UDL Laboratories), because the tablets may have contained too much of the drug’s active ingredient, exposing certain patients to risk.
First