As your bloggers – at least those without school-aged children – begin to mourn the dawning end of summer, we do at least see one bright spot in the ever-shortening days: ACI’s annual Drug and Medical Device Litigation conference.
We’re looking forward to interesting presentations from the always-exceptional faculty of in-house counsel, top defense
We have blogged several times about mass tort plaintiffs who failed to list their tort claims in prior bankruptcy proceedings, thereby stiffing their creditors. See here, for example. Do they get away with it? Usually not. Courts have routinely sent those tort plaintiffs packing, and two different theories call for that result: (1) lack
The Lawyers For Civil Justice is conducting a non-scientific poll on social media concerning challenges that litigators face that involve expert evidence. LCJ’s poll asks the following question:
The Federal Rules of Evidence and Daubert require judges to determine whether the testimony offered by an expert witness is sufficiently reliable to be admitted. To your
Our firm represents a couple of companies in the vaginal mesh MDL, so it is difficult for us to write on that, er, fascinating litigation. But one of our clients solved that problem for us by extricating itself from a lawsuit, leaving behind interesting issues about a hospital’s potential exposure in a product liability case.
Judges should … judge. They should decide legal issues. But some judges think their primary role is to “manage” litigation. It turns out that such management often means strong-arming parties into settlement. Is that appropriate? We wondered about that. We wondered it aloud. We wondered it in the presence of one of our Summer associates,
We’ll get right to the point. In Merck & Co. v. United States Department of HHS, ___ F. Supp.3d ___, 2019 WL 2931591 (D.D.C. July 8, 2019), the court held that the direct-to-consumer pricing regulation proposed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (“CMS”) – on which we’ve commented here, and here
We’ve mentioned before that negligence per se requires a claimed violation of a definite enactment – like a 70 mile per hour speed limit – that can substitute for the ordinary negligence “reasonable man” standard. However, we’ve never really studied it closely. Because negligence per se seems to be flowing rather than ebbing in prescription
We’ve blogged a number of times about how litigation funding arrangements involving personal injuries and mass torts collide with various ethical and statutory obligations owed by either the funders or the lawyers they fund. These all involve United States litigation. But when the New York Times reported on the questionable funding arrangements that have occurred
If preemption had a family tree, the drug and device branch would be heavy. And, as our scorecards and cheat sheets demonstrate, there are obvious sub-branches that sprouted out of major Supreme Court decisions. We have the Wyeth v. Levine, 555 U.S. 555 (2009) pharmaceutical branch; the Medtronic, Inc. v. Lohr, 518 U.S.
Perhaps you recall how President Trump campaigned on behalf of “Big Luther” Strange in Alabama. Strange had been appointed by Alabama’s Governor to fill the Alabama United States Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions when Sessions became U.S Attorney General. Trump supported Strange’s effort to win election to the seat in his own right for