What follows is a guest post from Joe Metro and Andy Bernasconi of Reed Smith. Andy has some experience with the guest post gig (here and here), and Joe has finally heeded the call to share his fraud and abuse expertise with our readers. That particular expertise is not in abusing the legal
Private plaintiffs love to scream “fraud on the FDA”! Agency fraud is their magic potion for dissolving any FDA action that they don’t like. Just assert that the FDA was bamboozled and invite some jury somewhere to ignore what the FDA actually did. Unfortunately for the other side, Buckman Co. v. Plaintiffs Legal Committee,
We’ll be hitting all the Presidents’ Day sales today, but something tells me we’ll be disappointed because we won’t be able to buy, beg, borrow, or steal a new one. So we keep trying.
With plaintiffs desperate to find some way to continue pursuing aggravated, aggregated product liability litigation in their favorite venues after Daimler
We have always thought that the False Claims Act resides in some sort of alternate universe when it comes to pharmaceutical products. The central concept behind the FCA is easy: The FCA penalizes anyone who presents, or causes to be presented, to the federal government “a false or fraudulent claim for payment or approval.” 31
With Bexis having originally conceived the preemption argument that became Buckman Co. v. Plaintiffs Legal Committee, 531 U.S. 341 (2001), we are always on the lookout for ways in which plaintiffs attempt to circumvent Buckman’s result and thus to pursue private litigation over fraud on the FDA.
Plaintiffs love to claim fraud on
Our day job has been keeping us busy, so busy with depositions, motions, delayed flights, and assorted drama that we have not posted in more than a month. After such a long layoff, we had hoped to return with a vengeance, a “the North remembers” sort of vengeance. Instead, we get fair market value, Current
The New Jersey Supreme Court has ruled that once the Attorney General declines to take over a qui tam action, he can no longer use administrative subpoenas to compel testimony and documents from defendants and witnesses. In the Matter of the Enforcement of New Jersey False Claims Act Subpoenas, __ A.3d__, 2017 WL 2458163
This guest post by Andrew C. Bernasconi, of Counsel at Reed Smith, is about a hopeful development in a False Claims Act case we’ve already blogged about once. The previous post queried, what happens when a FCA relator, blinded by the dollar signs in his/her eyes, resorts to questionable means to gin up
Happy birthday to Stan Lee, the main man behind Marvel Comics. He wrote the stories for The Amazing Spider Man which, when we were 10 years old, we read with a good deal more enthusiasm than we presently feel when encountering the deathless prose in (a) a plaintiff motion to compel, or (b) pretty much any opinion out of the Missouri state courts. When we were at Comic Con in San Diego last Summer, the only autograph we wanted was Stan Lee’s. But the line was indecently long. Hundreds of Thors, Daredevils, and X-men stood between us and the object of our adoration. We knew any hope of meeting our hero was pure fantasy. Anyway, if our friends at the Abnormal Use blog do not have a picture of a Marvel comic at the top of today’s post, we will be very much disappointed.
Happy birthday, also, to Denzel Washington. Most of you probably know him from his movies, such as Glory, Malcolm X, Training Day, and, currently, Fences. But we first laid eyes on Washington when he appeared in the very fine television show, St. Elsewhere. That program was set in a Boston hospital. It ran from 1982 to 1988. Denzel Washington was in the cast all six years. The entire cast was superb, and the writing was inventive. It is possible that the ending of St. Elsewhere (cleverly titled “The Last One”) was a little too inventive. It turned out that everything that happened in the series was the fantasy of an autistic child. To our eyes, it seemed a bit of a cheat. But maybe it was a commentary on art. Art is artifice. It is a lie in service of some bigger truth. It is a fine falsehood.
So fantasy and falsehood seem to be our themes for the day. Massachusetts has an interesting history of falsehoods in legal history. The Salem Witch trials had their origin in a silly girl’s lies. It is easy to read the trial transcripts of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, or the trial of Lizzy Borden, and conclude that great injustices were done. More recently, and more to the point for the sort of law we practice, the history of False Claim Act cases against drug and device companies in the Bay State has been inglorious. Cases have marched forward and cost companies many millions of dollars in the absence of any actual falsehoods. We are even more dismayed when we consider the overly aggressive and incoherent positions sometimes adopted by our former employer, the Department of Justice. But maybe, just maybe, courts in the Bay State are starting to exercise some control over, and impose reasonable limits on, False Claims Act cases.
Ever since Buckman Co. v. Plaintiffs’ Legal Committee, 531 U.S. 341 (2001), held that state-law claims alleging fraud on the FDA are preempted, plaintiffs have been attempting to find some other way of bringing claims that attribute FDA actions to a defendant’s false pretenses. Since preemption is based on the Supremacy Clause, and the constitutional relationship between the federal and state legal systems, the doctrine doesn’t apply where recovery is sought under a federal statute. Since the False Claims Act (“FCA”) is a federal statute, sporadic attempts have been made to bring private fraud-on-the FDA-claims under that statute. Bexis, who invented what became the Buckman fraud-on-the-FDA/implied-preemption defense in the Bone Screw litigation, even worked on an amicus brief in one such case, United States ex rel. Gilligan v. Medtronic, Inc., 403 F.3d 386 (6th Cir. 2005), that was ultimately decided (favorably to the defense) on other grounds.
A little less than a year ago we reported on an excellent FCA result in United States ex rel. D’Agostino v. EV3, Inc., 153 F. Supp.3d 519 (D. Mass. 2015). Ever since we’ve been holding our breath, because the First Circuit has been known for pro-plaintiff rulings in cases against our drug and medical device clients. Indeed, the First Circuit once led our list the worst drug/medical device cases of the year for two years running – in 2012 and 2013. Whether something’s changed since then in the First Circuit, we can’t say. But we can report that the district court’s dismissal of fraud-on-the-FDA-based FCA claims in D’Agostino has just been affirmed with an excellently reasoned decision. See D’Agostino v. EV3, Inc., ___ F.3d ___, 2016 WL 7422943 (1st Cir. Dec. 23, 2016).
The facts in D’Agostino were thoroughly explained in our prior post. Briefly, the relator (a fired sales rep) alleged that the defendants pulled fast ones on the FDA with respect to the approvals/supplemental approvals of two medical devices, one called “Onyx” and the other “Axium” (these defendants evidently like “x” as much as did the former Standard Oil of New Jersey). The relator-plaintiff claimed that the defendants: (1) sought approval of Onyx for a narrow indication, but intended to promote it more broadly off-label (exactly the claim in Buckman); (2) failed to live up to promises made to the FDA concerning extensive surgeon training in using Onyx (also a form of fraud on the FDA); (3) concealed the failure of Onyx’s active ingredient in a different device (ditto); and (4) failed to recall earlier versions of Axium after obtaining FDA approval (not fraud on the FDA, but a theory that could dangerously penalize innovation). See D’Agostino, 2016 WL 7422943, at ??? (for some reason WL has omitted star paging, so we’ll also cite to the slip opinion), slip op. at 4-8. Critically, although the FDA was informed of all of these claims, the Agency never instituted any enforcement action, nor did the government elect to join the D’Agostino FCA action. Id. at 9, 15. As discussed in the prior post, the district court dismissed all of these claims with prejudice as futile.