A recent order from the Northern District of Illinois shows just how far public entities will go in trying to spread blame for opioid use and abuse, and in Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners v. Publicis Health, LLC, the district court found that a group of school districts reached too far. No. 24
At the DDL blog we unashamedly confess our biases. Foremost among those biases is that we walk the defense side of the street. Another inescapable bias, at least for this particular scribbler, is that we know and like many of the Philly judges. In the City of Brotherly Love, familiarity breeds respect.
Over the past
We have blogged several times before about the litigation misadventures of MSP Recovery, Inc., known for bringing Medicare recovery actions of questionable merit based on assignments of questionable validity that they obtain from various Medicare Advantage Plans looking for free money. Occasionally, MSP has branched also filed RICO claims of an equally dubious nature.
In Series 17-03-615 v. Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc., 2025 WL 1257677 (D. Kan. April 30, 2025), this would-be Medicare troll got trolled again, in yet another purported RICO class action. Five defendants filed five motions to dismiss – and they were all granted. Id. at *1. On most issues, the five motions raised similar grounds: lack of standing, lack of personal jurisdiction, and failure to state a claim. Id. at *12. That led to the plaintiffs’ monumental procedural mistake. Rather than bother to file separate responses to the five defendants’ motions, plaintiffs filed responsive papers that merely incorporated their responses to other defendants’ arguments by reference. “[P]laintiffs filed responses to each of the five motions to dismiss” but “aggregated their responses to similar arguments which multiple defendants raised.” Id.
Continue Reading Would-Be Litigation Troll Trolled Again
The Avandia MDL has been a long, winding, and ultimately meritless road. The FDA approved the drug to treat Type II diabetes in 1999, and the MDL got going in 2007, after a widely publicized, but ultimately disproven meta-analysis purported to show that Avandia presented an increased risk of heart attacks.
That was 18 years
Almost 15 years ago to the day, we posted the following question: why do third party payers and not patients bring RICO claims against drug and device companies for behavior that supposedly makes products cost too much? We were reporting on a case that dismissed the RICO claims of patients because they were indirect purchasers
We often say here that we try not to do the other side’s homework for them or give them ideas about new ways to sue our clients. When the Supreme Court takes a well-known statute and says, essentially, that it can now be applied in personal injury cases that also have economic damages, we do
The MSP plaintiffs are at it again, and without success this time around. In MSP Recovery Claims Series LLC v. Pfizer Inc., 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 38647 (D.D.C. Mar. 4, 2025), the group of law firms formed to file lawsuits under the Medicare Secondary Payer Act (hence the “MSP” in the various plaintiffs’ names)
When it comes to MDLs that concern a bunch of cases about a drug or device, they typically have a name like “In re [name of product(s)] Product Liability Litigation” or “In re [name of product(s) Marketing and Sales Practices Litigation.” In theory, the first group of MDLs involves, shockingly, product
Almost a year ago (how time flies!), we brought you our first Rico Madness post, regarding the cert petition in Medical Marijuana, Inc. v. Horn, and promised to keep you updated if the Supreme Court took the case. Well, they did and we are.
In our prior post, we noted that we are
We have often characterized judicial options as mixed bags, and a recent example of such a mixed bag can be found in Muldoon v. DePuy Orthopaedics, Inc., 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 130020 (N.D. Cal. July 23, 2024). The plaintiff claimed injuries from a ceramic-on-metal hip implant. He alleged that friction and wear caused the