Comment K

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This post is from the non-Reed Smith side of the blog.

We found it strange that last month’s decision in Jenkins v. Boston Scientific Corp., 2016 WL 1448867 (S.D.W. Va. April 12, 2016), held – almost as a throw-away point – that Texas law wouldn’t apply Restatement (Second) of Torts §402A, comment k (1965) to medical devices as it does to prescription drugs. That’s a notable, indeed almost unprecedented, result.

Jenkins did recognize that Texas law has, for a long time, applied comment k across-the-board to bar design defect claims against all prescription drugs. Id. at *5, citing Carter v. Tap Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 2004 WL 2550593, at *5 (W.D. Tex. Nov. 2, 2004) (“Under Texas law, all FDA-approved prescription drugs are unavoidably unsafe as a matter of law.”). Carter is hardly the only Texas case for applying comment k generally to bar design defect claims. We collected that law in our 2011 Comment K,Some of the Way post: Centocor, Inc. v. Hamilton, 310 S.W.3d 476, 516 (Tex. App. 2010) (comment k “provide[s] a defense to a design defect claim”), rev’d on other grounds, 372 S.W.3d 140 (Tex. 2012); Schwarz v. Block Drug Co., 1999 WL 274409, at *1 (5th Cir. 1999) (“Under comment K of the Restatement of Torts (Second) § 402A, a drug manufacturer is responsible in damages only if it failed to warn of a defect of which it knew or should have known.”) (unpublished, in table at 180 F.3d 261); Reyes v. Wyeth Laboratories, 498 F.2d 1264, 1273-74 (5th Cir. 1974) (applying unavoidably unsafe standard without individualized assessment); Holland v. Hoffman-La Roche, Inc., 2007 WL 4042757, at *3 (N.D. Tex. Nov. 15, 2007) (“[p]rescription drugs are not susceptible to a design defect claim where, as here, the drug is “accompanied by proper directions and warning”); Hackett v. G.D. Searle & Co., 246 F. Supp.2d 591, 595 (W.D. Tex. 2002) (“[t]he Court thus holds that under Texas law and comment k of the Restatement, Defendants can only be held strictly liable if the drug was not properly prepared or marketed or accompanied by proper warnings”).

However, after recognizing Texas law with respect to comment k and prescription drugs, Jenkins declined to apply comment k in the same fashion to medical devices:

I reject [defendant’s] contention that Texas’s absolute bar for FDA-approved prescription drugs, applies here, given that the products are neither FDA-approved nor prescription drugs. See Lofton v. McNeil Consumer & Specialty Pharm., 682 F. Supp.2d 662, 679 (N.D. Tex. 2010) (refusing to “take a leap not taken by Texas courts” in applying comment k categorically outside the prescription drug context).

2016 WL 1448867, at *5 (citation omitted).

That’s it. The entire extent of the discussion of Texas law on this point is one sentence and one citation. Absent is any discussion of why the policy reasons that have led Texas courts to apply comment k in every prescription medical product case over the last forty years don’t apply to prescription medical devices.

But what about Lofton?Continue Reading Don’t Mess With Texas

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In Hawaii, from whence today’s case comes, tourists are encouraged to try poi, mashed up taro root, which looks like purple wallpaper paste and tastes like, well, purple wallpaper paste. The term is also used as a friendly descriptor of ethnically ambiguous looking people, whose roots have been mashed together to form something not readily identifiable by traditional visual stereotypes. (At least it seemed friendly when we heard it applied to our own offspring.) Personally, we think it is a nice concept and the less that categorizing people to determine their rights, opportunities, and expectations happens, the better. For a number of aspects of product liability law, however, the decision on whether to proceed categorically or case-by-case is still hotly contested. This is particularly true for comment k to the Restatement (Second) of Torts, § 402A, which forms the meat of the decision in Segovia v. Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., CV. No. 15-00519 DKW-RLP, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 52405 (D. Haw. Apr. 19, 2016).

Segovia involves a fatal hemorrhagic stroke with an anticoagulant prescribed and used for atrial fibrillation. We are not sure what was different from the first complaint, but the second try made vague allegations about misrepresentations to FDA and others that it was “tested and found to be safe and effective for its indicated uses” and that FDA and others had not been told of the drug’s “defects” in support of allegations of strict liability and negligent failure to warn and design defect theories. While it seems like this complaint asserted claims based on non-existent duties and clearly preempted claims, the only issues addressed by the court on the motion to dismiss were whether Hawaii law took comment k to preclude design defect claims for all prescription drugs categorically and whether any fraud-based claims had been pleaded with sufficient particularity.

As to the first question, the court did not look to our relatively recent discussions on this issue, but generally looked to older cases to find the public policy rationale for taking a case-by-case approach for prescription drugs—which was essentially determinative on a motion to dismiss. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. The first step was determining what Hawaii case law already said about comment k and only two cases were discussed. Larsen v. Pacesetter Sys., Inc., 837 P.2d 1273, 1286 (Haw. 1992), involved a pacemaker—not a drug—and concluded that summary judgment based on comment k was inappropriate where there was evidence that the “pacemaker was demonstrably capable of being made safe for its intended use.” Forsyth v. Eli Lilly & Co., 1998 WL 35152135, **3-4 (D. Haw. Jan. 5, 1998), involved a prescription drug, but did not decide the issue of categorical or case-by-case because a genuine issue as to the adequacy of warnings was sufficient to preclude summary judgment. Rather than view these cases are leaving the issue open, the Segovia court found “neither Larsen nor Forsythe create a blanket rule of design defect immunity for pharmaceutical manufacturers, and the Court declines to extend comment k in a fashion that the Hawaii courts themselves have thus far declined to do.” 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 52405, *11. We think this misconstrues comment k, which does not provide “immunity,” and what it means to conclude that all prescription drugs are “unavoidably unsafe.”Continue Reading Some Case-by-Case Comment K Mixed with Some Insufficient Pleading of Fraud

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We aren’t going to mince words today. We don’t like Christiansen v. Wright Medical Technology Inc., MDL 2329, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 46409 (N.D. Ga. Apr. 5, 2016). It is an opinion on post-trial motions in a case that went to trial in the Conserve Hip Implant Products Liability Litigation. It’s a beautiful spring day here in the Mid-Atlantic and we hope that’s true where you are. If it is, and if anything in this post makes you interested in the greater details and nuances of the decision, we recommend taking it outside, sitting under a tree, and enjoying some fresh air. You should at least have pleasant surroundings while you try to get through it. It’s long, and tedious, and frankly, muddled. So, we are going to try to focus in on the key parts – so that we might also try to get out and enjoy some of this fine weather.

Christiansen is a hip implant case. It went to trial on 5 theories of liability: strict liability design defect, negligent design defect, fraudulent misrepresentation, fraudulent concealment, and negligent misrepresentation. Id. at *2-3. Apparently the court had dismissed plaintiff’s failure to warn claim on summary judgment. Id. at *69 n.18. The jury ultimately returned a verdict finding the hip implant was defectively designed and caused plaintiff’s injuries and awarded $550,000 in compensatory damages. The jury also found in favor of the defendant on the fraudulent misrepresentation and concealment claims, but awarded another $450,000 to plaintiff on his negligent misrepresentation claim and $10 million in punitives. Id. at *18.

But that wasn’t the jury’s first verdict. It’s first verdict, delivered days earlier, answered the first question on the Verdict Form – do you find the hip implant was defectively designed – in the negative. Id. at *6. While that should have been the end of the inquiry, the jury didn’t understand the instruction to not go any further and they kept answering the verdict form. So, they went on to find that defendant had made negligent misrepresentations and awarded plaintiff $662,500 in compensatory damages and $2.5 million in punitives. Id. at *7.Continue Reading Georgia MDL Court Muddles Utah Law

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When we examined Restatement (Second) of Torts §402A, comment k (1965), in our 2011 research post “Comment K, Some of the Way,” we remarked about how it said “a lot of things,” including: (1) that one can’t design away unavoidable risks, (2) that unavoidably unsafe products aren’t considered “unreasonably dangerous” for purposes of strict liability, and (3) that such products are “especially common” in the prescription medical product area. The first proposition suggests that design defect liability is incompatible with unavoidably unsafe product characteristics. The second indicates that unavoidably unsafe products shouldn’t be subject to strict liability. The third raises the issue of whether all prescription medical products should be considered unavoidably unsafe products – since their inherent risks are why they require a prescription in the first place.

We pointed out that some states, like California and Utah, prohibit design defect liability altogether, following that aspect of comment k. Others, like Pennsylvania, reject strict liability in the context of prescription medical products. Often, as is the case in Massachusetts, the status of negligent design liability is uncertain.

However, the most striking divide has always been between those states following a case-by case approach to determining whether a given product was “unreasonably dangerous” and those states that followed an “across-the-board” approach to comment k in the prescription medical product area. After adding everything up, we had to conclude in our blogpost that, despite its inherent inefficiency and tendency to second-guess the FDA, the case-by-case approach to comment k remained the majority rule.Continue Reading Comment K Case by Case – Falling Out of Favor?

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Happy Birthday, Eric Clapton. (Today is also the birthday of painters Goya and Van Gogh. Is there something about March 30 that breeds people who turn their blues into art?) Clapton has been around so long it is easy to take him for granted. He has built up a formidable body of musicianship. He is the only three-time inductee in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for his solo work as well as his stints with the Yardbirds and Cream. We remember how, in the late 1960s, one of our sisters would scribble on her school notebooks that “Clapton is God.” That sister later married a very nice, very hip guy, who was also a Clapton fan. A couple of years ago Clapton’s autobiography came out. Our brother-in-law summarized the book thusly: “I made a lot of music, took a lot of drugs, caused a lot of damage to relationships and health, but in the end, everything was pretty cool.” Just so.

In the early 1990s, we were working at a law firm representing the Robert Stigwood Organization (RSO). You might remember RSO as the force behind the soundtracks for Grease and Saturday Night Fever. RSO also managed the careers of the Bee Gees, Andy Gibb, Yvonne Elliman, and Clapton. In our case, RSO, along with Eric Clapton, was being sued by Jim Gordon, the drummer in the short-lived rock group Derek and the Dominos. Gordon claimed he had been denied writing credit and money for the long piano coda in the all-time great song, “Layla.” By the time he filed the lawsuit, Gordon was a resident of the Atascadero Prison for the criminally insane. Somewhere along the way, Gordon had started hearing a voice. That voice told him to kill his mother. With a hammer and butcher knife. He obeyed that voice. Needless to say, the deposition of Gordon behind prison walls was odd. Earlier in the case, our firm sent a representative to London to meet with our co-defendant, Mr. Clapton. That assignment went to another associate – one who didn’t even like Clapton’s music that much – certainly not as much as we did. Our bitterness and envy were complete. We insisted that the lucky associate (a close friend of ours, but his musical tastes ran more toward c&w and happy pop than toward guitar gods) relay a message to Clapton that, of all the versions of “After Midnight,” the best was the slow one that ran on the Michelob beer commercials. Imagine our delight when we were told that after Clapton listened to that opinion, he paused thoughtfully, nodded, and gently assented: “Yes. That one is the most soulful.”

It would be hard to list all of the great songs that Clapton worked on, but here is a start:

  • “For Your Love” (with the Yardbirds. Clapton hated the poppy-ness of the song and left the group just before the song climbed the charts)
  • “White Room” (listen to that solo and try arguing that the Drug and Device Law Sister was wrong all those years ago about deifying Clapton – go ahead, we dare you!)
  • “Sunshine of Your Love”
  • “Badge” (written with George Harrison. On the track credits, the rhythm guitarist is listed as L’Angelo Misterioso- that’s Harrison, who couldn’t use his real name for legal reasons. Damn lawyers.)
  • “Crossroads”
  • “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (we read somewhere that John Lennon contemplated replacing Harrison with Clapton, but Clapton wasn’t interested in becoming a Beatle)
  • “Layla” (the title song of rock’s greatest double album. Like most of the songs on that magnum opus, it is about Clapton falling in love with Harrison’s wife, Patti Boyd. Ms. Boyd, by the way, was one of the screaming, predatory schoolgirls in the Hard Day’s Night movie)
  • “Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad”
  • “Bell Bottom Blues”
  • “I Shot The Sheriff” (Maybe the original version by Bob Marley is better, but Clapton’s is also superb)

[The founder of this blog wants us to include “Wonderful Tonight” on our list of Clapton favorites. Who are we to refuse? But who knew there was a softer side of Bexis?]

Another one of Clapton’s hits was “Cocaine.” And thus we have an introduction to today’s case, Tersigni v. Wyeth, 2016 U.S. App. LEXIS 5393 (1st Cir. March 23, 2016). Tersigni was a diet drug case, and the alleged injury was Primary Pulmonary Hypertension (PPH). PPH is a very bad disease. The claims were brought under Massachusetts law for negligent design and negligent failure to warn. The trial court dismissed the negligent design claim. The negligent failure to warn claim went to the jury, which returned a defense verdict. On appeal, the plaintiff raised these issues:

  • The negligent design defect claim should not have been dismissed
  • The court should not have admitted evidence at trial that the plaintiff had been incarcerated
  • The court should not have admitted evidence at trial of the plaintiff’s cocaine use

Continue Reading First Circuit Upholds Defense Verdict in Diet Drug Case

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As drug and device lawyers we live in a comment k dominated world.  When we say comment k on this blog, everyone knows what we mean.  We aren’t talking about a scientific discovery regarding potassium.  We aren’t reviewing a new flavor of k-cup for the Keurig.  We aren’t posting about breakfast cereals.  And we definitely are not passing comment on the Kardashians, Kobe, Keanu, or K-Fed.

But just in case you need a refresher, here is the comment k that concerns us:

Unavoidably unsafe products. There are some products which, in the present state of human knowledge, are quite incapable of being made safe for their intended and ordinary use. These are especially common in the field of drugs. . . . Such a product, properly prepared, and accompanied by proper directions and warning, is not defective, nor is it unreasonably dangerous. The same is true of many other drugs, vaccines, and the like, many of which for this very reason cannot legally be sold except to physicians, or under the prescription of a physician. . . .  The seller of such products, again with the qualification that they are properly prepared and marketed, and proper warning is given, where the situation calls for it, is not to be held to strict liability for unfortunate consequences attending their use, merely because he has undertaken to supply the public with an apparently useful and desirable product, attended with a known but apparently reasonable risk.

Restatement (Second) of Torts §402A, comment k (1965)  (emphasis added).  As you can see from the highlighted language, comment k recognizes that some products – drugs and medical devices in particular – are “unavoidably unsafe” and therefore not defective if properly prepared and accompanied by an adequate warning.  Most courts to have considered the issue have interpreted comment k to mean that manufacturers do not face strict liability for properly manufactured prescription drugs that are accompanied by adequate warnings.  That is true in Washington.  Young v. Key Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 922 P.2d 59, 63 (Wash. 1996) (under comment k, a prescription drug manufacturer is liable “only if it failed to warn of a defect of which it either knew or should have known . . . it is liable in negligence and not in strict liability”).Continue Reading No Error With Comment k Jury Instruction

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We have not posted for a while—that day job can really get in the way sometimes—so we agreed to tackle the ridiculously long decision in Christiansen v. Wright Med. Tech. Inc., MDL No. 2329, 1:13-cv-297-WSD, 2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 115601 (N.D. Ga. Aug. 31, 2015), as a bit of penance.  This act may be appropriate given the recent Day of Atonement and, much like long Yom Kippur services during a fast, the decision drags on, repeats itself, has some highs and lows, and maybe induces some confusion and a touch of a headache.  While we are not looking for a scapegoat, some of the reasoning for why the issues were presented how they were presented and why they were decided is lost on the reader, at least this reader.  (Much like the original meaning of Azazel, to where/whom the original scapegoat was to be sent by Aaron.  Or maybe not at all like that.)  As a combination Daubert and summary judgment order on a bellwether case from an MDL for a product, a metal-on-metal hip implant, for which there is considerable litigation on similar products made by other manufacturers, there will likely to attempts to extend various parts of this decision to other cases.  So, we will resort to the dreaded use of subheadings in discussing it.

Background

Plaintiff had a left hip replacement in 1995 with a device that used a ceramic femoral ball, a polyethylene liner, and a metal acetabular shell.  In 2006, plaintiff had her right hip replaced with the defendant’s product, which utilized a ball and cup each made of cobalt-chromium with no liner.  In 2012, plaintiff started experiencing pain in her right hip and, within a week, had a revision surgery where the defendant’s product was explanted (and presumably something else was implanted).  All three surgeries were done by Dr. Lynn Rasmussen, who happened to have been consulting with defendant on designing hip implants in between the second and third surgeries.  In doing the third surgery, Dr. Rasmussen observed what he called “metallosis” (sometimes “metalosis” in the records and briefs), but did not send any explanted tissue or material for pathological evaluation.  Plaintiff sued under a range of product liability theories based on the risk of “metallosis.”  Thereafter, plaintiff named at least ten experts to weigh in on causation and defect in some form or other, most of whom relied to some degree on Dr. Rasmussen’s characterization of what he saw—and defendant filed a bunch of Daubert motions.  Plaintiff filed a “motion for partial summary judgment” that preemption and the learned intermediary doctrine did not apply to her claims and, at the court’s request, the defendant filed a motion for summary judgment on all the claims that plaintiff did not drop.  An affiliated defendant also filed for summary judgment on different grounds.  There were some other motions we are ignoring, but everything was addressed in one big decision.Continue Reading Making Sense of the Rule 702 and Summary Judgment Orders in A Metal-on-Metal Hip Implant Bellwether Case

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Not so long ago we discussed how Pennsylvania law clearly precludes prescription medical product strict liability, but plaintiffs keep asserting that cause of action anyway.  The plaintiff bar is nothing if not persistent.

We also confront a similar stubbornness when it comes to California law on strict liability.  Twice in the last few months, we have encountered a plaintiff argument that is so specious as to beggar belief.  But it seems to be in the California plaintiff playbook, so let’s do our best to counter it.  Here is the argument:  California’s Restatement (Second) of Torts section 402A comment k ban on strict liability design defect claims against unavoidably unsafe products applies to medical devices only if they are implants. That argument is grounded more in opportunism than logic.  Why do plaintiffs keep making this argument?  Simple – because almost all of the California cases applying comment k to medical devices have involved implanted devices.  So what?  And did you notice how we said “almost”?

Comment k outlines the legal liability for unavoidably unsafe products. It is a necessary caveat to the strict liability provision of section 402A.  Strict liability differs from negligence in that it eliminates the necessity for the injured party to prove that the manufacturer of the product erred. It focuses not on the conduct of the manufacturer but on the product itself.  A truly rational scheme of strict liability could conceivably work well and efficiently if it reduced litigation costs, if it reduced uncertainty (which would require a rational limit on noneconomic and punitive damages), and if it excluded liability for products that are necessary but also unavoidably unsafe.  Strict liability cannot be the same as absolute liability.  That is where comment k comes in.  It begins by saying that “[t]here are some products which, in the present state of human knowledge, are quite incapable of being made safe for their intended and ordinary use.  These are especially common in the field of drugs.”  Voila!  Drugs are the easy case.  Comment k goes on to extend the principle to “vaccines, and the like, many of which for this very reason cannot legally be sold except to physicians, or under the prescription of a physician.”  Vaccines, technically, are different from drugs – they are biologics.  The point is that comment k did not try to catalogue the products it covered.  Rather, it announced a principle of protecting necessary but unavoidably unsafe products. Comment k did not mention medical devices [when comment k was written in 1962-65, the FDA did not yet have explicit authority over devices] nor did it exclude devices. But, as you read above, comment k did seize upon the importance of physician prescriptions. You did not miss that, did you? Oddly, plaintiff lawyers in California keep missing it.Continue Reading How Does a Bad Idea Get Implanted?

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This post is from the non-Reed Smith side of the blog.

In the latest decision from the Pelvic Mesh MDL, the court ordered a consolidated trial of no fewer than thirty-seven plaintiffs with nothing in common save claiming injury from the same product.  See Mullins v. Ethicon, Inc., C.A. No. 2:12-cv-02952, slip op.  (S.D.W. Va. Aug. 4, 2015).  The consolidation is an attempt at a Rule 23(c)(4) single-issue class certification without the class action – since class actions are never certified anymore in personal injury prescription medical product litigation (as demonstrated here).  To reach the same procedural result, Mullins limits consolidation to defect/breach of duty and “general causation”:

[T]he consolidated trial will only involve . . . issues concerning the design of the [defendant’s mesh]  and whether that design was reasonably safe.  Determining reasonable safeness necessarily involves consideration of the [product’s] capability to cause injury.  As a result, causation will be relevant to the consolidated trial but only in the general sense. In other words, the pertinent issue will be whether the [product] can cause injury (general causation), not whether it did in fact cause injury to a particular plaintiff (specific causation).

Mullins, slip op. at 5 (citation omitted).Continue Reading Further Deconstruction of the Law in Pelvic Mesh

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Yes, we’re well aware of the latest development in the Pelvic Mesh MDL.  See Mullins v. Ethicon, Inc., C.A. No. 2:12-cv-02952, slip op. (S.D.W. Va. Aug. 4, 2015).  However, due to Reed Smith’s Pelvic Mesh representations, we’re constrained in what we can say.  We’ll just have to let prior, non-Mesh posts speak for us…

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