Both sides in Gilead v. Superior Court have filed their opening briefs in the California Supreme Court, and the extreme nature of the California Court of Appeal’s opinion extending a manufacturer’s duties has been laid bare. As expected, the defendant convincingly argued that the California Court of Appeal has imposed potentially unlimited liability on product
For design defect claims, a key issue is whether the relevant jurisdiction requires evidence that a suitable alternative design existed that would have allowed the plaintiff to dodge the alleged injury. This blog has posted at length about alternative design requirements and their nuances. These posts address everything from the existential question of “What
We reported a few months ago on oral argument in the California Court of Appeal in Gilead Life Sciences v. Superior Court, where the parties argued about whether California law recognizes a broad “duty to innovate.” At issue was whether a product manufacturer could be liable to patients taking one drug for failing to
Our work on “hard goods” (automobile, appliance, fire) product liability cases is greatly outnumbered by our drug and device cases (and probably also outnumbered these days by website privacy cases). But the history of product liability has often been driven by such hard goods cases. Think of Cardozo’s famous opinion in MacPherson v. Buick.
We observed oral argument the other day in a case that could have a significant impact on potential liability under California tort law for pharma companies and all other innovators. In Gilead v. Superior Court, No. A165558 (Cal. Ct. App. First Dist.), a panel of the California Court of Appeal is considering whether a
Maybe we have been doing this too long. Or maybe, like the prequels, spinoffs, and reboots that are so prevalent among streaming entertainment options, there is just a lot of repetition. In serial product liability cases, we hope that repetition leads to consistency of results or at least predictable rules of the game. Consider the
This is a follow-up post on the case of Knapp v. Zoetis, Inc. – an animal drug case. While not our typically fare, it is still a prescription drug case involving adverse event reporting to the FDA and the learned intermediary doctrine. So, while this patient had four legs instead of two, the legal framework
If the pelvic mesh litigation ever ends, the tongue of history will tell a tale of specious plaintiff theories that hoodwinked judges and juries into condemning good products. Plaintiffs extracted millions of dollars and erased product lines by cobbling together irrelevant workplace material handling sheets, counterfactual stories in which the FDA does not exist, and
Lots of cases get parked in MDLs. There is no denying it. It’s built into the system. Individual cases get brought together in a single court for the purpose of consolidated pretrial proceedings. For the most part, except for cases selected as bellwethers, that means MDLs are focused on general discovery, general experts, and general
The Northern District of California did not mince words in its opinion in Rodman v. Otsuka America Pharmaceutical, Inc., 2020 WL 2525032 (N.D. Cal. May 18, 2020) and so neither will we. Plaintiff had three theories of failure to warn and a design defect claim and they all failed in grand fashion due in