When we head into a trial against a personal injury plaintiff, our client, the defendant, occupies the right side of the v. We mean that simply as a matter of word placement. It is Plaintiff v. Defendant, not the other way around (though on appeal the parties can be scrambled). By “right” side, we are
N.D. Indiana Dismisses Pelvic Mesh Negligent Misrepresentation and Unjust Enrichment Claims
If hard cases make bad law, big cases make really bad law. No cases are bigger than product liability multidistrict litigations. Some have populations dwarfing the towns where many of you were raised. Perhaps it is the high stakes involved, or perhaps it is the judicial obsession with settling many thousands of cases ASAP, but
Distributor Gets Out of Gadolinium Failure to Warn Claim
The case of Dennis v. Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals Inc., et al., 2020 WL 534307 (W.D. N.C. Feb. 3, 2020), has occupied our in bin for about a year, probably because there are aspects of it that rub us the wrong way. But not all of Dennis is a menace. If you represent a drug
Pro Se Xarelto Plaintiffs Shown the Door for Failure to Comply with Lone Pine Order
February is a fine time to cuddle up with a good book or a short case. Take a look at In re Xarelto Products Liability Litigation, 2021 WL 493069 (E.D. La. Feb. 10, 2021). Pro se plaintiffs brought a lawsuit claiming their relative died from a brain hemorrhage caused by Xarelto. Their case was
Ninth Circuit Affirms Breast Implant Dismissals
Approximately 18 months ago we reported on C.D. California cases that silicone breast implant defendants managed to keep in federal court and then get dismissed with prejudice. We expressed delight with the opinions because the court’s discussions of fraudulent joinder and preemption were particularly insightful. No doubt another source of our delight was that the
Taxotere Court Dismisses Claims by Former Bellwether Plaintiff Even Though She Did Not Want to be “Singled Out”
By now our beef with Multidistrict Litigations has become monotonous: plaintiff lawyers assemble enormous inventories of weak cases, then contort the bellwether pool to ensure that only their best cases go to trial. We remember an oral argument in front of an MDL judge in which we employed statistics to show that a representative MDL
Talc MDL Court Reaffirms Dismissals Based on Lack of Personal Jurisdiction
Last July, Bexis blogged about two inconsistent personal jurisdiction rulings in talc litigation. Those rulings created a personal jurisdiction split between a Missouri court and the talc MDL court on whether non-Missouri plaintiffs could sue a non-Missouri defendant in Missouri even if those plaintiffs did not use the product or suffer an injury in
Deposing Attorney’s Failure to File Appearance Does Not Preclude Use of Deposition to Support Statute of Limitations Defense
A couple of times in recent weeks we have discussed pelvic mesh cases where a central issue was whether the cases were time-barred by a statute of limitations or repose. (See here and here.) There is a reason why this issue crops up persistently. The pelvic mesh litigation started off as a mass tort
Tennessee Statute of Repose Shuts Down Pelvic Mesh Case
On Christmas Eve we blogged about a pelvic mesh case that had the veritable “mixed bag” of rulings. A bad bit in that bag was the court’s ruling that the statute of limitations had not been triggered until a doctor performed a revision operation and told the plaintiff the operation was necessary to address issues
D.N.J. Dismisses Orthopedic Screw&Plate Case/We Dole Out Top Ten Entertainments That Helped Us (Temporarily) Forget COVID
We refuse to end the year on a bad note, so we’ll talk about a case that’s good – not good enough to make tomorrow’s top-ten list, but good enough to slam the door shut on 2020 with a reasonable amount of cheer.
Vicente v. Johnson & Johnson, 2020 WL 7586907 (D.N.J. Dec. 21,