Mandamus appeals are difficult to win. That’s one reason that we were intrigued to read In re Williams-Sonoma, Inc., ___ F.3d ___, 2020 WL 131360 (9th Cir. Jan. 13, 2020). The second was the result, which prevented an improper would-be class representative from using discovery as a bootstrap method to his own replacement. The
When we were still (relatively) young lawyers, we defended Bendectin cases. There was nothing wrong with Bendectin – the litigation produced Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993), the Supreme Court’s landmark decision on excluding bogus expert testimony, and numerous other decisions, state and federal, excluding “junk science.” Nonetheless, Bendectin’s primary
While the focus of this blog is on product liability cases, we have had occasion to touch upon Lanham Act cases involving litigation between commercial competitors. One reason is because Lanham Act cases provided significant early precedent for the principle that FDA exclusive enforcement powers prohibit plaintiffs from bringing what amount to private FDCA violation
In their unending quest to make a plaintiff out of everyone, some creative members from the other side of the “v.” have concocted a claim that we call “fourth-party payor” liability. Regular blog readers are certainly familiar with “third-party payor” actions brought – entirely for economic losses – by insurers, pension funds, and other organizations
We made a statement in our recent Age of Reptiles post concerning the decision, Fitzpatrick v. Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers, ___ N.E.3d ___, 2019 WL 5792847 (Mass. App. Nov. 7, 2019), that we had to check. We described Fitzpatrick as “the first appellate case we know of that has specifically addressed and declared certain
Here is an interesting order that recently emerged from the Benicar multi-district litigation. Certain plaintiffs’ counsel (identified by name in the order) represent about 450 “plaintiffs who have settled their claims against defendants in exchange for a monetary payment.” In re Benicar (Olmesartan) Products Liability Litigation, 2019 WL 6271285, at *1 (D.N.J. Nov. 22,
The opinion, Schrecengost v. Coloplast Corp., 2019 WL 6465398 (W.D. Pa. Dec. 2, 2019), recently “predicted” that Pennsylvania would allow strict liability design and warning defect claims in cases involving prescription medical products. Id. at *11-13. In so doing Schrecengost was not only wrong, but loud wrong. First, without even a serious discussion, Schrecengost
For a few years, it seemed like we were blogging about the Weeks case every few months. Beyond providing an opportunity for temporal quippery, Weeks caught our attention because it was one of the holdout cases against the tide of cases rejecting Conte, the crappy California case that invented innovator liability. After the
The Holiday season is also the cinema season. We’re giddy about movies right now. Today sees the release of the trailer for No Time to Die, the 25th Bond film (counting only the “official” EON productions – sorry about that, Casino Royale (1967) and Never Say Never Again (1983)). No Time to Die (hereinafter
We’ve used the phrase “one-two punch” before in the blog to describe a pair of legal decisions concerning the same product. Usually, our clients have been on the winning side, but that’s not always true, particularly in cases coming out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In November, the Pennsylvania appellate courts, in gynecomastia litigation, dealt defendants two