Critics have been known to accuse us of being too hard on product liability plaintiffs and too forgiving of defendants who develop medical products. We all have our biases, especially after many collective decades of representing the latter group, but we do think the table is often tilted in favor of the former group. One
This post is from the non-Reed Smith side of the blog.
We posted last week about In re Valsartan, Losartan, & Irbesartan Products Liability Litigation, 2020 WL 7418006 (D.N.J. Dec. 18, 2020), a decision that came in just time to take a sport on our Worst of 2020 post. Just as we were
Procedural considerations often decide cases. Sometimes, weighty legal issues are reached through quirky procedural routes. When it comes to whether state tort law provides medical monitoring as a remedy for people who do not have a present compensable injury, that is a legal (and policy) issue. We have written many times that we think foundational
We don’t like class action tolling. We don’t think that plaintiffs should be rewarded for filing a meritless class action (or any other meritless act) with a potentially broad and lengthy exemption from the relevant statute of limitations. We particularly don’t like cross-jurisdictional class action tolling, which makes a state’s enforcement of its own statute
We’ll be very clear – as we have before: We don’t like most class actions. Indeed, if given our druthers, we would abolish Rule 23, as it applies to class actions for damages, altogether. But that’s not in the offing anytime soon. Today, we offer a class action decision that we think both sides, us
Stop us if you have heard this before. A group of plaintiffs bring a purported class action under a range of California consumer protection laws seeking damages related to the purchase of a medical product (or collection of somewhat related medical products) that they claimed failed to comply with FDA requirements. The defendants raise preemption
Sometimes we write on issues for peculiar reasons. Today, for example, a case on a certain topic caught our eye because of its catchy name: Clark v. Perfect Bar. So many questions arise from this concise, yet provocative tag. Did the owner of the 100-year-old brand Clark Bar get sideways with a modern upstart
“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” – Proust
The lesson of today’s case, Racies v. Quincy Biosciences, LLC, 2020 WL 2113852 (N.D. Cal. May 4, 2020), is worth remembering. Litigation can turn on recollections, and they can be fragile. (That is undoubtedly why documents end up
The Third Circuit issued a gem of an opinion on class certification last month, and we like it because it puts a laser focus on what a plaintiff has to prove to get a class certified and the district court’s duty to examine and resolve disputes at the class certification stage. In In re Lamictal
Are moisturizing lotions cosmetics or drugs? They say on TV that lotions “lift and moisturize,” but does that move them into the “Drug” column of the “Food Drug and Cosmetic” ledger? We will hazard a guess that lotions are usually cosmetics, but what if the manufacturer adds an SPF factor? We would then say that