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We say today’s case is about SIRVA (shoulder injury related to vaccine administration), but plaintiff tried her best to run from that allegation in her opposition to defendants’ motion to dismiss.  That’s because a SIRVA case runs up against not only a preemption obstacle, but also serious duty and causation barriers.  But since the court

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Drug manufacturers are not insurers against injury from or while taking medications.  Neither are distributors or pharmacies.  Just because a patient experiences a complication while taking a medication, including the very condition the medication is supposed to help prevent, does not mean that some person or entity should be liable to the patient for her injuries.  Sometimes, there is no fault or liability to be found.  We do not think these are controversial principles, but we find that they apply to more than a few of the cases giving rise to the decisions about which we expound.

We also find that missing facts from complaints can speak volumes.  Similarly, when a plaintiff waits until the third complaint to add case-specific factual allegations that should have been there from the start or when factual allegations pop in and out of serial amendments you have to question the basis for those allegations.  At least we do.  As inveterate curmudgeons, we tend to think bare-bones, boilerplate allegations are unlikely to be supported if the case gets to the merits.  Of course, part of the game for some plaintiffs is to get past pleadings and hope the defendants opt for settlement instead of paying the costs of defense.  The Twombly and Iqbal decisions tightened pleading standards, and thus improved the chance of success on motions to dismiss in federal court and some states have followed along.  The hole, and source of our periodic grumbling, is how often dismissals are without prejudice and accompanied by leave to amend.  Too often, it seems that the provision in Fed. R. Civ. P. 15 that courts “should freely give leave when justice so requires” leads to leave even when it should be obvious that amendment will be futile, not to mention a waste of judicial resources.Continue Reading Five Strikes Needed To Dismiss A Questionable Case

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We have posted twice before about decisions that reject duty-to-train claims under the rubric of “educational malpractice.”  Now Pennsylvania has joined the party.  Grady v. Aero-Tech Services, Inc., 2022 WL 683720 (Pa. Super. March 8, 2022), an unpublished, but citable, decision of Pennsylvania’s major intermediate appellate court, applied Pennsylvania’s prior precedents that reject educational

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As we discussed in our recent 50-state survey on failure-to-report claims, plaintiff-side allegations seeking to predicate “warning” liability on a defendant’s allegedly failing to comply with FDCA adverse event reporting claims are “relatively new.”  That’s because, like so many other novel claims we’ve seen lately, it’s a transparent dodge to avoid preemption.  We said

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A long time ago in a law school relatively far away, we took torts as a first year law student.  Many of the cases about which we learned (or were supposed to have learned) were from even longer ago and we had no idea how much some of those old cases would inform our practice. 

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When we last left our story, plaintiffs had lost their fight to have Pennsylvania law apply to residents of Texas ( Atkinson I) and lost a chunk of their claims as barred by the Texas statute prohibiting failure to warn claims where a drug’s label has been approved by FDA and comment k (

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Manufacturers supervising medical doctors?  In two words, they don’t.  Yet plaintiffs, particularly in cases where preemption forecloses more normal product liability claims, try to get courts to impose such duties.  We took a look at that issue back during the early days of the blog, when it was still a Bexis/Herrmann operation, in our September