By now our beef with Multidistrict Litigations has become monotonous: plaintiff lawyers assemble enormous inventories of weak cases, then contort the bellwether pool to ensure that only their best cases go to trial. We remember an oral argument in front of an MDL judge in which we employed statistics to show that a representative MDL

Yesterday afternoon, only a few minutes after we saw the storm warning and cut short our walk with the Drug and Device Law Little Rescue Dogs, a brief but violent thunderstorm crashed through our neighborhood in the western suburbs of Philadelphia. (We note, parenthetically, that the adjective “violent” describes our weather with unprecedented and escalating

Plaintiffs will go to great lengths to stay out of federal court, including naming local defendants against whom the plaintiffs have no real intention of pursuing the lawsuit with even a smidgen of seriousness. Sometimes that is called “improper joinder,” but we prefer the term “fraudulent joinder” because that more accurately captures what is afoot.

We write today about a partial exclusion of a plaintiff expert in the upcoming Taxotere bellwether trial. We have blogged about other aspects of the Taxotere litigation previously. (Here and here, for example.) The case is In re Taxotere (Docetaxel) Prods. Liability Litig., 2019 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 130339 (E.D. La. Aug. 5,

Plaintiffs in mass tort drug and device litigation do not like to focus on the individual cases.  They like to amass the individual cases.  They like to file the individual cases.  But as we see all too often those filings tend to be indiscriminate and without the benefit of proper early vetting.  That is what

Today’s guest post is by Sherry Knutson and Brenda Sweet of Tucker Ellis, and concerns the recently passed legislative repeal of a Michigan statute that, for several decades had effectively immunized prescription drugs from ordinary product liability actions under Michigan law. For background, here’s a prior blogpost that focused on the now-repealed statute. As