Last Saturday was World Mental Health Day. We hope you celebrated by getting outdoors in the very pleasant weather typical of early October throughout this beautiful country. We hope you also spent a few moments taking stock of your own mental wellbeing. Lawyers do not conduct such a self-assessment nearly enough. We are focused on
Anyone remember Monty Python’s first movie, before anyone had ever heard of them? Along with the dead parrot and the Lumberjack Song, “And Now For Something Completely Different” featured a formally dressed man, sitting at an unexceptional desk, both of the sort you might find in a British law firm of the era (early
Our ongoing tour of Famous Novels We Missed Along the Way has introduced us to some splendid prose. Thackeray and Trollope insert subtle judgments just beneath the surface of their narratives. They can teach us much about how to deliver an opening statement that is a powerful argument precisely because it does not sound like
Bexis has been an active member of the American Law Institute (“ALI”), particularly concerning the ALI’s ongoing projects involving the Third Restatement of Torts. Thus, regular blog subscribers have read about his adventures attempting to dissuade the law professors who draft these projects from pursuing their natural biases towards always increasing liability (more liability =
On many occasions, we’ve remarked that in modern prescription medical product liability litigation MDLs, the main objective of both plaintiffs and their counsel is to file as many lawsuits as possible, and then to do the bare minimum possible to avoid dismissal. The idea is to run up the numbers, make the defendants spend huge
Over the past seven weeks we have been sports-starved. Back episodes of The Great British Baking Show do not quite make up for missing the start of baseball season and the NBA and NHL playoffs. But two things have ridden in to the rescue: (1) The Last Dance, the ESPN ten-part documentary about the
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