The definitive source for intelligent commentary on the law that matters for drug and device product liability cases
This is actually Rachel Weil’s post, but she is having password problems, so Bexis is doing the actual posting
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We spent last weekend in a shore house with extended family members (all vaccinated, of course) gathered to celebrate a cousin’s milestone birthday. Since we had last gathered, babies had been born, the family matriarch…
There is a lot of scholarship and other material out there on issues having to do with federal multidistrict litigation (“MDL”) practice. See, e.g., footnote three, in the article below. But state MDL equivalents? Not so much. The Blog’s co-founder wrote a book about this a while ago, see Herrmann, et al.,…
We’ve griped about multi-plaintiff consolidated trials for years on this blog, both generally, and in the specific context of prescription medical product liability litigation. Now the issue is before the Supreme Court in one of the most grotesque miscarriages of justice that we’ve seen – and several of us practice in Philadelphia – a…
We have been consistently critical of the MDL system for encouraging judges presiding over such massive aggregations to manipulate the applicable law to create settlement pressure on defendants. We’ve seen that with federal preemption, willingness to create novel state-law causes of action, choice of law, and trial consolidation of multiple plaintiffs. …
The same Missouri Supreme Court that couldn’t be bothered to review a 22-plaintiff consolidation that resulted in a ten-figure verdict in a talc case saw fit to review a defense verdict in a pelvic mesh case. One wonders where justice stands among that court’s priorities. At least the verdict was affirmed – if only barely,…
As consumers, and connoisseurs, of personal jurisdiction precedent, we write today to consider the latest jurisdictional mess that has arisen, this time in talc litigation. Two courts, deciding the same jurisdictional issue on the same set of facts in the same week, have reached diametrically opposed decisions. The current contretemps concerns “Shimmer” – a minor…
In prescription medical product liability litigation, size matters. It doesn’t matter as much as having good products and winning arguments, but when the name of the game on the other side is to drag defendants into pro-plaintiff forums and then use every procedural trick in the book to try to “ring the bell” on some…
When we’re trying to decide whether to see a movie, one place we turn for advice is the Rotten Tomatoes website. We visited the site recently to see what those purveyors of overripe fruit had to say about “The Favourite,” which attracted our attention with an interesting trailer that preceded “The Crimes…
It’s been a long road. Well after product liability litigation over Accutane and inflammatory bowel disease (“IBD”) had been thoroughly debunked everywhere else in the nation, such litigation lived on in New Jersey – for year after interminable year. First, a number of trials occurred, but literally every verdict for the plaintiffs was reversed on…
Over 11 years ago the blog published a post called “Anatomy of a Mass Tort,” which endeavored to explain the life cycle of this type of litigation. We’ve decided to revisit and update that post, given the changes that have taken place over the intervening years.
And change it has. Our original post…