Today’s case is not a drug or device case, but a COVID nursing home case. We are not blogging on the underlying substance of the case but rather on plaintiff’s motion to remand after a snap removal. The case – Carroll v. Comprehensive Healthcare Management Services – is pending in the Western District of Pennsylvania.
Defendants get accused of using snap removals as some sort of nefarious litigation tactic to thwart the forum defendant rule and drive cases into federal court. But all defendants do when they “snap” remove, is follow the law as written. In case you are new to this area of the law, we will stop here
We looked back over the blog and it’s been over one year since we posted on snap removal. Last spring and summer, we reported on new pre-service removals almost monthly. So, we decided to poke around a bit and see if there was anything going on outside the drug and device law space. We found
This blogger took last week off. Not just from blogging, but from the confines of home and office – which are still one and the same. During those five days of much needed sun and sea, we had a friend stay at the house to watch the dog. Our dog/house sitter cleared out before we
Those of you following the fortunes of COVID-19-related litigation should check out these two recently decided cases: Garcia v. Welltower OpCo Group LLC, 2021 WL 492581 (C.D. Cal. Feb. 10, 2021), and Fields v. Brown, 2021 WL 510620 (E.D. Tex. Feb. 11, 2021).
Garcia, the older of the two (by one day),
Approximately 18 months ago we reported on C.D. California cases that silicone breast implant defendants managed to keep in federal court and then get dismissed with prejudice. We expressed delight with the opinions because the court’s discussions of fraudulent joinder and preemption were particularly insightful. No doubt another source of our delight was that the
There is no reasonable basis to remand Cazares v. Ortho El Paso, P.A., 2020 WL 4562231 (W.D. Tex. Aug. 7, 2020) because there is no reasonable basis for plaintiff’s strict liability claims against a hospital. And that is sufficient.
That, however, is not what the magistrate who first ruled on plaintiff’s motion to remand
Here is another post from our junior blogger-in-training, Dean Balaes. He tackles one of the blog’s favorite subjects, removal before service to bring our readers the skinny on the first case where a plaintiff attempted to interpose a COVID-19 objection to snap removal, unsuccessfully. Since other plaintiffs might try the same thing, that makes
We have always puzzled over why pre-service removals are the least bit controversial. We are referring to what are known as “snap removals,” or removals to federal court before any forum defendant has been served. They are one way to comply with the removal statute’s forum defendant rule. It’s pretty simple: Even when you have
There’s a reason plaintiffs hate removal before service – “snap removal.” It has the potential to wreak havoc on their mass tort business models, which are largely based on confronting defendants with as many cases as possible in the worst jurisdictions possible. While federal courts are hardly perfect, they are usually better than the state-court