Developments in the Rouviere v. DePuy litigation have already produced two of our blogposts. Rouviere v. DePuy Orthopaedics, Inc., 471 F. Supp.3d 571 (S.D.N.Y. 2020), which we discussed here, produced one of the first major decisions of the COVID-19 pandemic on remote depositions as the “new normal.” Then, Rouviere v. DePuy Orthopaedics, Inc.
Here’s something we’ve never seen before in a mass tort MDL. In In re Zostavax (Zoster Vaccine Live) Products Liability Litigation, 2021 WL 3375941 (E.D. Pa. Aug. 3, 2021), two former MDL plaintiffs who had suffered summary judgment against their claims were allowed to rejoin the MDL – to assert legal malpractice claims against
From the beginning of the Blog we’ve made our position on “cy pres” class action distributions plain – we hate them. We had hopes that the United States Supreme Court would deep six the whole concept in Frank v. Gaos, 139 S. Ct. 1041 (2019), but as we guessed here,
That’s the main lesson of the emerging fiasco that is the ALI’s benignly named “Concluding Provisions” project for the Restatement Third of Torts. While this title suggests that the Institute is merely engaged in routine “mop up” work, nothing could be further from the truth. Any number of significant tort-related topics were not addressed by
Have you ever had a plaintiff dead to rights with a dispositive motion, and instead of opposing the motion, the plaintiff moves for voluntary dismissal? We have, and it can be annoying as hell, especially if the judge is one of those who would rather not decide anything – and grants the plaintiff’s motion.
What
Only five days after our recent post highlighting the possible no-private-right-of-action implications of the (to us, anyway) obscure Astra USA, Inc. v. Santa Clara County, California, 563 U.S. 110 (2011), case, the Fourth Circuit applied it along the lines we had speculated could be helpful to defendants. Bauer v. Elrich, ___ F.4th ___,
This is actually Rachel Weil’s post, but she is having password problems, so Bexis is doing the actual posting
***********
We spent last weekend in a shore house with extended family members (all vaccinated, of course) gathered to celebrate a cousin’s milestone birthday. Since we had last gathered, babies had been born, the family matriarch
Back in the early days of the blog, when it was a Bexis/Herrmann operation, we wrote about the California Supreme Court decision that opened the floodgates to all that food litigation that now plagues that state − Farm Raised Salmon Cases, 175 P.3d 1170 (Cal. 2008). We explained how the court In Farm Raised
We are in the midst of a multidistrict litigation in which the claims are even more frail than usual, the quality of the ‘inventory’ is even junkier than usual, and the pace of discovery regarding individual cases is even slower than usual. Nevertheless, the plaintiff lawyers (joined, sadly, by the court) frequently express exasperation with
Repko v. Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center, Inc., 2020 N.J. Super. LEXIS 204 (N.J. Super. App. Aug. 13, 2020), is not a new case, but it was new to us when learned co-counsel brought it to our attention as support for getting rid of a case from a crap-ridden MDL inventory. We say