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
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,