Today’s guest post is by the Reed Smith team of Shana E. Russo, Jennifer A. Eppensteiner, and Kathy I. Oviedo. It is about multi-district litigation (“MDL”) practice, and specifically, compares and contrasts various ways of selecting plaintiffs for possible bellwether trials. It also useful in providing links to orders entered in a
By now our beef with Multidistrict Litigations has become monotonous: plaintiff lawyers assemble enormous inventories of weak cases, then contort the bellwether pool to ensure that only their best cases go to trial. We remember an oral argument in front of an MDL judge in which we employed statistics to show that a representative MDL
We’ve complained before about MDL “master” or “consolidated” complaints being used to deprive defendants of the ability to pursue their rights to seek dismissal on TwIqbal and other pleading-related grounds. In individual actions, defendants have the right to put the plaintiffs’ pleadings to the test required by Rules 8 and 12. That has not necessarily
Late last year we awarded our #10 spot on our Worst of 2020 post to In re Valsartan, Losartan, & Irbesartan Products Liability Litigation, 2020 WL 7418006 (D.N.J. Dec. 18, 2020) (“VLI”). At that point the decision was brand new, and we promised a more in-depth analysis. Here it is.
VLI fits
A couple of times in recent weeks we have discussed pelvic mesh cases where a central issue was whether the cases were time-barred by a statute of limitations or repose. (See here and here.) There is a reason why this issue crops up persistently. The pelvic mesh litigation started off as a mass tort
In our personal jurisdiction posts, we’ve generally taken a dim view of plaintiffs who attempt to oppose Rule 12(b)(2) dismissal motions with requests for jurisdictional discovery. Both our experience and our perspective leads us to view such requests as overwhelmingly likely to be fishing expeditions, designed more to delay and to increase the expense of
The decision in In re Bard IVC Filters Products Liability Litigation, 969 F.3d 1067 (9th Cir. 2020) (“Booker”), is yet another reminder that multidistrict litigation as it is currently conducted is a fundamentally flawed process, dedicated more to forcing settlements than to any of the goals envisioned by Congress when it passed
It’s hard to believe, but fully five months after COVID-19 was officially declared to be a “pandemic,” it’s still extraordinarily difficult to get oneself tested – particularly if one is not already sick or exposed. Maine has been one of the most successful states in reducing the virus’ spread, with the third lowest rate of
We’ve all seen the signs – No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service. Their exact origin may be unknown but these signs appear to have come to popularity in the 1960s and 1970s as a response by businesses to keep “long-haired hippies” out of stores and restaurants. Or maybe they were there before that but just
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