We’ve said before that plaintiff lawyers do a better job of putting together bench-bar conferences than the defense side does. It mirrors to a certain extent what goes on in the courtroom. The plaintiff side is better at showmanship. It is not just us saying that. Last week, we were at a bench-bar conference focused
The court in In re Acetaminophen—ASD-ADHD Products Liability Litigation confronted a problem that should not have existed in the first place–plaintiffs’ co-lead counsel violating confidentiality and coordination orders that he had helped negotiate.
The underlying orders were straightforward. The MDL confidentiality order protected confidential and highly confidential information produced in the litigation and prohibited the
Bexis recently attended the Spring Conference of the Product Liability Advisory Council (“PLAC”). PLAC meetings are usually good for new blogpost ideas, and this one was no exception. Today’s idea comes from an unusual source, though – the final day’s ethics presentation. That presentation was about artificial intelligence, mostly in the mass tort context. One
In truth, this post is not so much a review as a full-throated endorsement. We are telling colleagues that they need to read Elizabeth Chamblee Burch’s The Pain Brokers (One Signal Publishers 2026). Two things drive our enthusiasm for this book: cynicism and pride.
First, let’s indulge our cynicism. The Drug and Device Law
There are two main issues that make the eyes of your dutiful Drug and Device Law bloggers well up in frustration over In re Taxotere (Docetaxel) Eye Inj. Prods. Liab. Litig., No. 3023, 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 233514, 2025 WL 3442731 (E.D. La. Dec. 1, 2025).
The first is a gut-level, “this is an
Is it really an opposition to a motion to compel if the brief does not bemoan the plaintiff’s discovery “fishing expedition”?
We don’t think so. A license to practice law seems to mandate that the holder must use the fishing expedition metaphor whenever discovery is the topic. As a result, we were a little amused
Some litigations are gifts that keep on giving. A big chunk of DDL work product consists of commentary on a couple of mass torts. Maybe it is a version of the 80-20 rule, or how a huge percentage of crimes are committed by a relatively small group of career criminal recidivists. For a while, Aredia-Zometa
Our readership is tuned into current events and stays up to date on significant drug and device litigation. We bet no one missed that Taylor and Travis are getting married, or that a college football game being hyped as the biggest regular season game in at least a decade (Texas v. Ohio St.) happens tomorrow. We also bet that the blog’s readers know what GLP-1 inhibitors are—medications developed for diabetes and now widely prescribed for weight loss. At least one poll estimated that 12% of the U.S. population has taken a GLP-1 medication.
About a year ago, we posted about the successful efforts of the defendants in the GLP-1 MDL to have the court, rather than permitting unfettered discovery at the outset, instead tee-up certain “cross-cutting” issues that would impact the scope of the MDL. Yesterday we posted about the MDL court’s ruling on preemption of the plaintiffs’ design defect claims. Today we address a separate decision addressing the admissibility of expert testimony on a cross-cutting issue. In re Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 Receptor Agonists Prods. Liab. Litig., MDL No. 3094, 2025 WL 2396801 (E.D. Pa. Aug. 15, 2025).
Continue Reading Trimming Down the GLP-1 MDL
The day before this post went live there was a retirement ceremony for Judge Jon P. McCalla, the federal district judge for whom we clerked three decades ago. After serving as an Army officer in the Vietnam War, Judge McCalla got his J.D. from Vanderbilt and clerked for Judge Bailey Brown of the Western District
This post comes from the non-Butler Snow side of the blog.
The Bair Hugger MDL has an up and down history. First, we lauded the district court’s Rule 702 rulings that led to summary judgment across the board for the defendant. But then the Eighth Circuit reversed. The cases came back to the district court