We tend to favor a “glass half full” outlook. We are preternaturally sunshiny during our daily “how was your day” calls from the 86-year-old Drug and Device Law Dowager Countess. (We have not mentioned, for example, that our aging dog has begun sleeping most of the day and barking most of the night, resulting in
Punitive Damages
The Ninth Circuit’s Booker Decision

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…
S.D. Indiana Limits Punitive Damages in Acetaminophen/TEN Case

Uncertainty plagues American litigation and accounts for the frequent analogy to a lottery. The same case tried before two different juries will produce two very different results. Within the same jurisdiction, a plaintiff might ring the bell this week, but get zeroed out the next. Factor in different jurisdictions, and the possibilities will wander all…
Another Arizona Court Strikes a Plaintiff’s Request for Punitive Damages

This post comes only from the Cozen O’Connor side of the blog.
If you’re a defendant in a drug or device lawsuit in Arizona court, you have a good chance of avoiding punitive damages. That’s because Arizona has a statute, a good one. It exempts manufacturers, including drug and device manufacturers, from liability for…
Florida Court Tosses Punitive Damages Claim Pre-Trial

It’s a case that pre- and post-dates the IVC Filters MDL– Ocasio v. C.R. Bard, Inc., 2020 WL 3288026 (M.D. Fla. Jun. 18, 2020). In fact, this case got through summary judgment and Daubert rulings in Florida before being transferred to the MDL in Arizona in 2015. Upon its return to Florida, only two…
Florida Court Tosses Punitive Damages Outta Here!

. . . .And a few other claims too. But the punitive damages decision jumped out at us as something we don’t see that often. In fact, the court in Nunez v. Coloplast Corp., — F.Supp.3d –, 2020 WL 2561364 (S.D. Fla. May 20, 2020) only had conflicting precedent to go on. But to…
Missouri Tort Reform: Abusive Lawsuits Won’t Keep Rolling Along

Missouri is central to America – geographically, culturally, and politically. Some of our greatest literature came from Missouri authors (Twain, Eliot, Angelou). Media figures as unifying as Walter Cronkite and as divisive as Rush Limbaugh at one time called Missouri home. American music wouldn’t be the same without tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins (listen to the…
Texas Law Yields A Better Result On A Motion To Dismiss

Truly unique cases are, well, unique. Most cases involve variations or combinations of cases we have seen before. Sometimes you get different results between two decisions on basically the same case with a single fact different. In February, we posted on an Eastern District of Pennsylvania decision on a motion to dismiss in a case…
The Sun Shines on Heightened Pleading Standards in Arizona

We don’t write a lot about our neighboring state of Arizona, but a recent hip replacement case in the District of Arizona caught our eye. We lived in Arizona for a year back in the mid-1990s, and it is a genuinely interesting and underestimated place. The 2010 census results have Phoenix as the sixth largest…
Plaintiff’s Pyrrhic Pradaxa “Victory”

Various plaintiff-side consortia have taken it into their heads to sue every manufacturer of so-called “novel oral anticoagulants” because these products, gasp, can cause serious, and sometime fatal, bleeding incidents. Fortunately, on the whole the plaintiffs haven’t done so well with these cases – losing almost all the trials – because jurors can be taught…