A very helpful to-be-published opinion from the California Court of Appeal caught our eye this week because it comes out the correct way on an issue that has always bothered us: Does a defendant (not the plaintiff) in a product defect case have to offer evidence on medical causation to a reasonable degree of medical
When we were small – ten or so – our father worked twenty miles from our home, in the town in which we now live. The town was – and is – a few miles from the Devon Horse Show, a world-famous affair held for eleven days each spring spanning Memorial Day Weekend. For one
We write on a chilly day in Philadelphia – we and the Drug and Device Law Little Rescue Dogs all shivered on our morning walk. And we are excited to share the news that our scruffy shelter rescues will be joined, a la Lady and the Tramp, by some relative aristocracy later this year: our
Not too long ago we researched precedent that forbade persons claiming to be “FDA experts” from opining that products are “adulterated” or “misbranded.” In that post, we mentioned that this research is a subset of a “general” precedent “precluding expert opinions on questions of law,” which we didn’t get into because Bexis’ book addressed it.
The Incretin-Based Therapies MDL has followed a long and winding road, and it all should come to an end with a recent Ninth Circuit opinion affirming the exclusion of the plaintiffs’ only general causation expert. It all started in 2013 with the MDL transfer of cases involving multiple diabetes drugs to the Southern District of
The pelvic mesh remand hits just keep coming. We like Shostrom v. Ethicon, Inc., 2022 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 55748 (D. Colorado March 28, 2022), because it hammers some ubiquitous plaintiff mesh experts and because it finds a way to depart from an awful MDL ruling. The fact that the opinion comes at the expense
Enborg v. Ethicon, Inc., 2022 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 51601 (E.D. Cal. March 21, 2022), is the pelvic mesh case of the week, and it involves a variety of plaintiff challenges to the defendant’s experts. That fact in itself is interesting. Usually it is the defense side that challenges expert opinions. Maybe the plaintiff side
In a recent post, we discussed a decision that, among other things, excluded an FDA expert’s “opinion” that the defendant’s medical device was “adulterated” and/or “misbranded.” In Robinson v. Ethicon, Inc., 2022 WL 614919 (S.D. Tex. March 2, 2022), the court held that the expert “cannot take the final step of opining that
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