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There was a time when it seemed that half our posts were mixed bags of TwIqbal — product liability claims tested against the SCOTUS decisions in Twombly and Iqbal requiring pleadings to be substantive and plausible.  Then things settled down for a bit.  Did plaintiffs get smarter?  Did courts resume tolerance for bare bones complaints?

Back in our AUSA days we prosecuted many drug cases. That was a significant part of our job.  The defendants were uniformly unsavory and many were violent. That being said, the mandatory minimum sentences were often crazily high.  Sell 50.1 grams of crack and eat ten years.  If you had a prior drug conviction (hardly

Here is a brief and happy follow up to our stupid expert tricks redux post.  That post by Bexis involved a purported talc plaintiff-side expert who authored what could charitably be called a “junk science” medical article (now two such articles) on cosmetic talc causation of mesothelioma.  This “research” (we grin as we write that

Long ago, a senior partner told us that clear writing flows from clear thinking. That might be so, but clear thinking and clear writing do not necessarily produce the correct result.  For example, you’d have a tough time finding a legal opinion written more clearly than Calchi v. Topco Assocs., LLC, 2024 U.S. Dist.

United States v. Cal. STEM Cell Treatment Cntr., Inc., 2024 U.S. App. LEXIS 24525 (9th Cir. 2024), is not, strictly speaking, a product liability case at all.  But it hits several of our personal sweet spots.  For example, it is from the Ninth Circuit, where we clerked for Judge Norris.  It involves another

Whoever said “you get what you pay for” never deposed a plaintiff expert.  Most plaintiff experts we’ve encountered acquired their expertise – if that’s what you want to call it – not in any substantive area but, rather, in slinging junk science hash at juries with a straight, and maybe even solemn, face.  As if

Plaintiff lawyers read this blog, which we like. Criticism occasionally comes our way because the blogposts – horrors! – harbor a particular point of view. And that point of view occasionally gets recharacterized as bias or an admission against our clients.  Such recharacterizations are invariably nonsensical. So far, they have never obtained even a foothold