The California Supreme Court issued its widely anticipated opinion on the learned intermediary rule the other day, and the opinion is worth the wait. Based on the oral argument (which we reported on here), we did not expect the Supreme Court to enact a fundamental change to the learned intermediary doctrine, and the Court
Plaintiffs’ attorneys are always looking for new ways to sue pharmaceutical companies. Under the banner of “no good deed goes unpunished,” plaintiffs in California recently sued a prescription drug manufacturer after they took advantage of the manufacturer’s program to help pay for a medicine widely used to treat arthritis and plaque psoriasis. There are no
When we tell people what we do, we often get a response, from lawyers and non-lawyers alike, to the effect of, “so you do class actions.” The somewhat canned response is that “serial product liability litigations” or “mass torts” rarely involve certified classes other than settlement classes because individual factors in personal injury cases almost
This post is from the non-Reed Smith, non-Dechert , and non-Holland & Knight side of the blog. Everyone else is involved.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is a classic Clint Eastwood spaghetti Western where even the Good may not be all good. In California state court, a demurrer sustained is a defense win, right? Although there are some bright spots, In re Ranitidine Cases is one of the ugliest defense wins we have seen in a while, providing leave to amend and a roadmap for further expansion of the Gilead duty-to-innovate.Continue Reading Post-Gilead Heartburn in the California Ranitidine Litigation
Those of us who took Con Law as first year law students may recall Marbury v. Madison as an early test of the Supreme Court’s place in our nascent republic. Alliteration being a mnemonic device, some may recall that Madison was Secretary of State James Madison and the decision was written by Chief Justice John
The California Supreme Court has granted review in Gilead Life Sciences v. Superior Court, the case in which the California Court of Appeal ruled that the defendant could be liable to users of one drug for alleged negligence in connection with a different drug, even while admitting that the drug they actually used
We recently recapped the law relating to when experts are allowed to opine on what was in the head of another and how a pending Supreme Court criminal case might affect things. In our area, this issue comes up most frequently in the context of plaintiff experts trying to offer their spin about how the
We observed oral argument the other day before the California Supreme Court in Himes v. Somatics, a case that places California’s learned intermediary doctrine squarely in the spotlight. A learned intermediary case before the California Supreme Court? For your ever-vigilant DDL bloggers, that is like Thanksgiving and Christmas wrapped into one!
Who will be
Since honoring the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Nexus Pharms., Inc. v. Cent. Admixture Pharm. Servs., Inc., 48 F.4th 1040 (9th Cir. 2022), as being our third best decision of 2022, we have been waiting for (and expecting) a court to apply it to a food labeling case. And now one has –
It is a simple fact that product liability plaintiffs almost always prefer state court and product liability defendants almost always prefer federal court. This is a major reason why removal fights, sometimes intertwined with personal jurisdiction fights, happen so often in these types of cases. Another reason is that product liability plaintiff lawyers like to