The “mesh case of the week” — Robinson v. Ethicon, Inc., 2022 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 36441 (S.D. Texas March 2, 2022)— is a veritable mixed bag. We cannot decide whether to carry that bag from the car trunk to the kitchen table or just heave it in the dumpster.
The issue in Robinson was
One of the things we didn’t mention in our prior post about the excellent Sardis v. Overhead Door Corp., 10 F.4th 268 (4th Cir. 2021), Rule 702 decision, was that one of the inadmissible experts had relied on “search[ing] it on Google” as the basis for some of his junk opinions. Id. at 287
If the concept behind Multidistrict Litigations is centralized, efficient management of common issues in large numbers of lawsuits, with remand of trial-ready cases, then MDLs are less than successful on those grounds, and certainly not successful enough to justify the asymmetric discovery and bad rulings (or nonrulings) that come as part and parcel of the
It more or less came out of nowhere, but we’re now watching what’s going on in the Martinez v. Coloplast Corp., No. 2:18-CV-220-JTM-JEM (N.D. Ind.), pelvic mesh case. Recently, we’ve come across a number of interesting, and generally favorable, Fed. R. Civ. P. 702 expert gatekeeping decisions bearing that caption, as Martinez approaches trial
Every once in a while, we encounter a decision that is so obviously wrong that we have to pause and go back to the basics to make sure we did not miss something in our initial read. This dynamic is something like reading the troubleshooting instructions that you might get when you buy a new
If the pelvic mesh litigation ever ends, the tongue of history will tell a tale of specious plaintiff theories that hoodwinked judges and juries into condemning good products. Plaintiffs extracted millions of dollars and erased product lines by cobbling together irrelevant workplace material handling sheets, counterfactual stories in which the FDA does not exist, and
In In re: Onglyza and Kombiglyze XR Products Liability Litigation, MDL 2809, 2022 WL 43244 (E.D. Ken. Jan. 5, 2022), the MDL judge bifurcated discovery into two phases with general causation proceeding first. At the close of expert discovery, plaintiffs move to exclude three defense experts and defendants moved to dismiss one plaintiff expert.
Multidistrict litigations are big piles of wrong. Wrong incentives invite the wrong cases, the wrong rulings, and the wrong results. Plaintiff lawyers park weak cases in MDLs, counting on ultimately collecting money for cases into which they invested virtually no work. Courts encourage that dysfunctional conduct by doing everything possible to force settlements, even if
We begin with the news that the Drug and Device Law Rock Climber has a new puppy. He is six months old and already over 60 pounds – a rescued Australian Shepherd mix. He is also white with blue eyes, a color pattern linked to deafness in dogs and cats. And he is totally deaf,
Recently, when we have spoken of vaccine litigation, it has mostly been about challenges to public health policies requiring vaccination against COVID-19 for healthcare workers, students at public universities, etc. We have been pleased to report that these challenges have been failing without lingering too long at the trial court level, like here, here