We’ve been blogging now, with one lineup or another, since November of 2006 – over five years. As we’ve said on a number of occasions, such as here, our philosophy has always been that a rising tide lifts all boats. It’s the nature of stare decisis (that earlier court decisions are the precedent on which later decisions rest) that defense wins anywhere tend to help other defendants everywhere. We thus strive to keep the pharmaceutical/medical device defense community abreast of new decisions, new arguments, and (when we’re lucky) new strategies that can help win cases.
We’re big firm lawyers. We have big firm clients and big firm resources. Not everybody is or does. But cases not involving big/big/big can be every bit as important as those that do. For instance, the two major product liability cases that established the (we’d say unfortunate) course of strict liability here in Pennsylvania are Azzarello v. Black Brothers Co., 480 Pa. 547, 391 A.2d 1020 (1978), and Berkebile v. Brantly Helicopter Corp., 462 Pa. 83, 337 A.2d 893 (1975). Everyone who’s heard of the Black Brothers Co. or the Brantly Helicopter Corp. other than in connection with these cases raise your hands.
We thought so.
Those cases handled for those clients have screwed up the law in Pennsylvania since before some of us started practicing it. We don’t think Pennsylvania’s unique. The Fortune 500 and the AmLaw 100 aren’t anywhere near all that matters.
Thus, as much as we want to reach – and be thought well of by – our big firm colleagues around the country (and globe), we believe it’s probably even more important to reach the folks in the regional firms, and defending the smaller companies, who are involved in prescription medical product liability litigation. Because those folks, and their clients, might not have the resources to do the kind of comprehensive research that we’re used to, we try to make what we do on this blog as helpful as possible, and we have even taken research requests on occasion. That’s probably the chief reason we keep our scorecards and cheat sheets. These concern important or current subjects, and provide (we hope) comprehensive and up-to-date legal research that anybody can use and craft to their particular cases.Continue Reading Who Are We/What Can We Do?
Blogging
On Self Promotion

Yesterday we blogged about co-promotion, an obscure topic if ever there was one. Today we’re blogging about promotion that’s considerably less obscure – self promotion. We’re not all that much into self-promotion here on the Drug And Device Law Blog, and before you start throwing things and telling us we’re a pack of blogging…
A Top 25 Blog?

As our regular readers know, here at DDlaw we concentrate pretty single-mindedly on content. We don’t do pictures; we don’t do videos, we don’t do gossip. We just try to keep everyone on the defense side of prescription drug and device product liability litigation informed of whatever we think is interesting or important at any…
Reparations

The last couple days’ dialogue with our subscribers suggests that the blog’s email outage was uneven. Some subscribers may have lost email transmission of our post for more than a month. We’ve already apologized, but we think we should do more. Here’s a list of what we posted about – with links – between June…
An Apology To Our Subscribers

We’d like to apologize to those of you (all 700+) who subscribe to our email feed through the Google Group function. Somehow, we’re not sure how, the Google Group became separated from our account. We don’t know when this started, but yesterday we started getting complaints and investigated. We believe it has now been fixed.…
Fare Thee Well, Dave Walk
Our Ears Are Burning….

Our esteemed blogger emeritus, Mark Herrmann, has some things to say about blogging as a business tool, over at his in-house counsel blog on Above The Law. Needless to say he uses us as an example. We’re not going to get into personal details (we’ll leave that to Mark), but after reading his post…
The Curmudgeonator Is “Bock” – We Think.

This is for all of you out there missing (as we do) the wit and wisdom of our blogger emeritus Mark Herrmann. Well, he’s back … er bock. We think, anyway.
We’ve heard it from the horse’s … OK, we’ll say mouth … that Mark will be returning in the near future as…
Four By Four

The Drug and Device Law Blog is four years old. Our first post – our once lampooned but more recently copied “Disclaimers and Terms of Use,” went up four years ago yesterday. Our first substantive post…. Well, that took a little longer. We’ve survived four years now.
We celebrated our first birthday here…
A Fool’s Paradise

Even though he’s retired – from blogging that is, not the practice of law – our blogger emeritus, Mark Herrmann, still finds ways to increase our audience here at Drug and Device law Blog. His beyond-the-grave piece on blogging, “Memoirs of a Blogger,” has just appeared in the ABA’s Litigation magazine. Credit has to be…