December 9, 2026? What is that about?
Well, December 9, 2026 is the deadline for each member nation within the European Union to have incorporated the EU’s new Product Liability Directive (“PLD”) into their own national laws. In key markets like Germany, that work is well underway.
Not every EU member state will meet
Today’s guest post is by Reed Smith‘s Jamie Lanphear. Like Bexis, she follows tech issues as they apply to product liability litigation. In this post she discusses a pro-plaintiff piece of legislation recently introduced in Congress that would overturn the current majority rule that electronic data is not considered a “product” for purposes
Today’s guest post is from Jamie Lanphear and Daniel Kadar, both of Reed Smith, who follow product liability events in Europe closely. They are discussing the implications of recent changes on the availability of attorney/client and work product privileges—called “legal professional privilege” in Europe—not only in Europe itself, but how European restrictions might find their way back across the pond to parallel litigation in the United States. As always our guest posters are 100% deserving of all praise (and any blame) from their posts.
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If you’ve ever found yourself grumbling about the breadth of U.S. discovery, you’re not alone. For U.S. lawyers, turning over reams of company documents is a familiar—if unwelcome—part of litigation. For most of our European colleagues outside of the UK, however, the idea of broad, adversarial discovery has generally not been a concern. That’s likely about to change. The EU’s new Product Liability Directive (PLD), which the blog has previously covered here, here, here, and here will expand disclosure obligations in product liability matters across the EU, and the implications for legal privilege—especially for in-house and U.S. counsel—are significant.Continue Reading Guest Post – The New EU Product Liability Directive: More Disclosure, More Risk for Privileged Communications
Today’s guest post comes from our Reed Smith colleague Jamie Lanphear on a topic near and dear to the Blog’s heart: The new EU Product Liability Directive. As always, our guest posters deserve 100% of the credit, and any blame, for their posts. But, also as usual, our guest posters deliver the goods, so we
In this, the Year of Our Lord 2025, that title could apply to so, so, so many things. Soooooo many things.
But this is the Drug and Device Law Blog, product liability is our niche, and what we are referring to is the new, 2024 European Union Product Liability Directive (the “PLD”), also known as
A long time ago, in a mass tort far, far away, the plaintiffs’ lawyers were not content with collecting plaintiffs from within the US. They also brought a putative product liability class action in federal court in the U.S. on behalf of European plaintiffs. As a result, your bloggers learned a little bit (a very
We’ve written a number of posts on whether, in various jurisdictions across the United States, software and other forms of electronic/magnetic code can be considered to be “products” for purposes of product liability – usually strict liability. As befits the decentralized product liability litigation landscape in the United States, there is considerable uncertainty, but most decisions, as well as both the Second and Third Restatements of Torts, have determined that incorporeal items composed of electronic bytes are not “products.”Continue Reading Software as a Product – The European Union Goes There