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,
Picture this. Invitations go out for a Thanksgiving get-together and the host and expected guests together sort out who will bring what foods and how everything will be served. A sideboard is loaded up with the traditional holiday foods, along with a collection of everyone’s quirky favorite salad items to allow easy compilation of a
We write as we prepare to head to the airport for a long weekend in Whitefish, Montana, a bit of paradise in in the Flathead River Valley of northwest Montana, just outside of Glacier National Park. As we have mentioned in other posts, Whitefish is the home of beloved friends of many decades, and we
We are writing about a case that does not involve drugs or devices because it runs through some of the very same personal jurisdiction issues we have warned about post-Bauman. Adams v. NHL, MDL No, 14-2551, Case No. 15-cv-00472 (SRN/JSM), 2019 WL 5079980 (D. Minn. Oct. 10, 2019), is a case from the
This post is solely the product of the Reed Smith side of the Blog.
Readers may recall that a couple years ago we proposed reworking the federal multi-district litigation statute, 28 U.S.C.A. §1407, in a variety of ways. Simultaneously, some of us have been working with Lawyers for Civil Justice to attempt MDL change through
Few things raise our blood pressure as much as the MDL process. MDL stands for Multi-District Litigation, but the M might as well stand for Mutilating and the D for Distorting. One-sided discovery, wholesale parking of ‘shotgun’ complaints, made-up spoliation issues, and bellwether trial programs that produce results representative of nothing other than plaintiff lawyer
You’ve heard the saying – you can run, but you can’t hide. Well, in Multidistrict Litigation, we could have a saying – you can hide, but only until remand. It’s no secret that in most mass torts, only a handful of cases are in the spotlight. The bellwethers. The intention, usually by all parties
We’ve repeatedly advocated that defendants try turn the e-discovery tables on plaintiffs whenever possible – particularly in MDLs where discovery is flagrantly one-sided – by going after plaintiffs’ social media information. In just about every case involving allegations of personal injuries, social media will have admissions by plaintiffs concerning their conditions and activities that concern
Late last year, we published two posts (here and here) about the gutsy and laudable Daubert decision in the Mirena IIH (idiopathic intracranial hypertension) MDL, in which Judge Paul Engelmayer of the Southern District of New York excluded all seven of the plaintiffs’ general causation experts. At that point, we assumed that it
As a young associate, we worked for a short time with then soon-to-be-Judge Harvey Bartle. We remember that, although kind and very funny, then-lawyer Bartle had a no-nonsense approach to law practice and a keen ability to discern the correct answer, sweeping aside fluff and obstacles en route to what made sense. We were excited