This post is about a hidden gem. That brings to mind a hiking trail that’s one of the two best in Pennsylvania (along with Ricketts Glen), but isn’t found in any of the “Fifty Hikes in [fill in the blank]” books that one finds in outdoorsy stores. The hike is part of the Appalachian
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.